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A famous author spent his final few days in agony and suffered a bizarre death after accidentally swallowing a toothpick on a cruise. Sherwood Anderson, a celebrated American writer who also suffered a nervous breakdown and had four separate wives, died in 1941 in one of the strangest literary deaths ever recorded — a tragedy so odd it sounds like fiction. He was 64 and on a pleasure cruise to South America with his fourth and final wife when disaster struck. Enjoying cocktails at a party, Anderson sipped a martini and, without realising, swallowed a tiny wooden toothpick lodged in his olive. Over the following days, he began to experience pain, which worsened as the ship steamed south. He was taken off the vessel in Panama and rushed to hospital — but by then, it was far too late. Doctors soon made the grim discovery. The sharp sliver of toothpick had pierced his intestines, causing a deadly infection known as peritonitis. Anderson died not long after arriving in Panama, leaving behind one of the most curious endings in literary history. The author, born in Ohio in 1876, had lived a life full of drama even before his bizarre death. He’d been a successful businessman before suffering a nervous breakdown in 1912 — an episode that saw him vanish from his office and wander the streets in a daze, asking strangers who he was. That collapse ended his business career but launched his writing one. From that moment, Anderson threw himself into fiction. His groundbreaking 1919 collection Winesburg, Ohio captured small-town US life and inspired a generation of writers — including Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck . Anderson once joked that he had “a heart that always needed editing”, which could explain his constant remarrying. His first wife, Cornelia Lane , came from a well-to-do family and they had three children together. But while he built his business empire, she reportedly got sick of his erratic moods and long absences. They eventually split up and he married free-spirited artist Tennessee Mitchell - sharing a “passionate, stormy and exhausting” relationship which wouldn’t last. His next wife Elizabeth Prall was a New York bestseller, but Anderson’s restless nature returned, as did rumours of flirtations with other women. His fourth and final wife Eleanor Copenhaver was 23 years younger than him, but stuck around until his death in 1941. When doctors performed the autopsy, they found the tiny toothpick still embedded in his gut wall — a splinter of wood that had destroyed one of America’s greatest storytellers. His epitaph says it all: “Life, not death, is the great adventure.” For Sherwood Anderson, it proved chillingly true.
