Sherwood Anderson was born September 13, 1876, to a poor family with an alcoholic father. Growing up in Clyde, Ohio, Anderson attended only one year of high school and worked various odd jobs to support his family. When he was nineteen his mother died, his father abandoned the family, and Anderson moved to Chicago. He served in Cuba during the Spanish American War and attended Wittenberg Academy in Ohio on his return. He married in 1904 and fathered three children. On November 28, 1912, he suffered a nervous breakdown that has become a legend in American literature, symbolizing the psychology of many modern American writers. He left his family and his manufacturing company for words alone. His first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, was published in 1916, and Marching Men one year later. His masterpiece, however, was Winesburg, Ohio written in 1919. Anderson intensely studied works by Freud, D.H. Lawrence, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, and especially Edgar Lee Masters, from whom he learned how to control and intertwine his short stories. Anderson himself became a major influence on younger writers such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Wolfe, and Steinbeck. He married three more times and published several works before his death in 1941.

"Death in the Woods" (1933) demonstrates Anderson's interest in the grotesque and the psychological inner lives of ordinary Midwestern Americans. This particular short story is narrated by Anderson who reflects on his childhood revelation of death as reality. Most of the story is concentrated on old woman Grimes, yet unlike the old lady in Eudora Welty's "Worn Path," her tale is told by an outsider looking in. Anderson begins with the statement that no one knows much about people like Grimes. His purpose in writing about her seems to make such people visible in order to elicit a response from the reader. Anderson interjects to add his emotions both as a child and as an adult during the Great Depression, but in the end still does not seem to understand the value of his story. The readers are shown a woman trapped in a horrible, abusive situation who somehow finds strength to caretake for others, including the brutish men on the bottom of the list who are not deserving of this woman's life. However, the audience must see beyond the impersonal and grotesque spectacle of her death to the idealogy emerging in the 1930s that prompts Americans to recognize and take action against individual human injustices.