Whereas London and O. Henry were best-selling popular writers whose choice of the short story genre made their work widely disseminated through the magazines, as well as in books, Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) was more experimental in his use of the form, and more self-consciously dedicated to it as a means of opening up new creative ground. A number of his critics have also seen the short story as focusing his distinctive strengths and avoiding the tendency to preaching and essayistic digression which sometimes mars his novels. His great literary breakthrough into the form came with the short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and it is this volume on which his reputation today mainly rests. But he published three further volumes of individual stories, The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923) and Death in the Woods (1933), and it is arguable that the best of the stories in these collections achieve qualities – or what might be called ‘short story values’ – which are even more suited to the form, and push its possibilities into even newer territory.

In terms of technique, Anderson above all reacted against the emphasis on plot to be found in O. Henry and his host of imitators as well as in Maupassant, and also against the moralizing tendency of many of the magazine stories. As he says in his autobiography, A Story Teller's Story,