A prolific writer, Anderson published eight novels, four collections of short stories, autobiographical works, poems, plays, and essays. Critics agree that his reputation rests on his influential short fiction, although his stories seem to range greatly in quality.

Anderson published his most important and influential work, Winesburg, Ohio, when he was forty-three years of age. By 1926, after two novels were panned by the critics, his critical reputation suffered. Although Anderson's style is modernist, his themes and subject matter are not, which led him to be considered as old-fashioned or irrelevant before his time.

Soon after Anderson's death, there was a renewed critical interest in his work. In the 1940s several anthologies of his fiction appeared and the first two biographies of Anderson were published. In his critical study Sherwood Anderson, Rex Burbank asserted, "No other writer has portrayed so movingly the emerging consciousness of the culturally...