I DOUBT Walter Rideout ever thought about winning an award for his biography of “Winesburg, Ohio” author Sherwood Anderson. He was too busy fretting about ever finishing it.
Rideout, the much-admired longtime professor of English at UW-Madison who died in April 2006, did finish the book (and lived to hold the first volume in his hands).
Now, Rideout’s two-volume “Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America” has won the 2007 Biography Award from the Society of Midland Authors, a group founded in 1915 by writers like Edna Ferber, Harriet Monroe and Clarence Darrow.