David D. Anderson is a native of Lorain, Ohio, a town best known for its factories and mills, but should be celebrated for its outstanding and influential writers. He received his BS degree in 1951 and MA degree in 1953 from Bowling Green State University, and earned his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 1960. He was awarded the MSU Book Manuscript Award for his critical biography on fellow Lorain resident Sherwood Anderson in 1961.

He began teaching English in 1953 at the General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan and joined the English faculty at Michigan State in 1956. In 1957 he moved to the university’s Department of American Thought and Language from which he retired in 1993 as distinguished professor emeritus. David is also a veteran of World War II and the Korean Conflict and is listed in Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in America.

In 1971, Anderson founded the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and is currently its Executive Director. He is the author or editor of thirty-five books and more than three hundred published articles, essays, short stories, and poems and has been the editor of numerous journals including MidAmerica, Midwestern Miscellany, SSML Newsletter and University College Quarterly.

Anderson has chaired the Modern American Literature of the Modern Language Association, was a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at the University of Karachi, and has been an American delegate to the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literature. He has lectured throughout Europe, Asia, and Australia, and has presented more than a hundred papers to scholarly organizations.

Louis Bromfield’s “Cubic Foot of Soil”
An essay by David D. Anderson from the Summer 2005 Ohioana Quarterly