The very title of Anderson's later play, The Eve of St. During his high school years, in New Hampton, Iowa, Anderson was introduced to Shakespeare, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. By eighth grade, Anderson had read all the major novelists, but his preferences led toward poetry. Among some of the works that intrigued him was James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, and a handful of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays. Due to a mastoid infection that kept him out of school for one year, as his sister Lela remembers, Anderson was confined indoors and he began reading more than ever. When Anderson was not laboriously attending his father's sermons or working in the fields, he would read every piece of literature he could get his hands on. When Anderson became 13, he began helping the family raise money by laboring 'almost every kind of farm work known to man on almost every kind of farm,' says Robert Rice. Alternatively, he wanted his son to become an agnostic, a member of no church, but still a passionate believer in Christ and the spiritual possibilities of man. 'My father,' Anderson recalls, 'was.what you call a good mixer, and a wonderful orator.but I knew it was all put on.' William Anderson, a stern and devout man, had no intentions for Maxwell to enter the ministry. Anderson spent time in Andover, Ohio, in 1890, then Townsville and Edinboro, Pennsylvania he lived in McKeesport, New Brighton, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania moved to Jefferson, Ohio, in 1901 then to Algona, Iowa. Every few years, his father's responsibilities to the Baptist church forced his family to move all over the eastern United States.

He was the second child and oldest son of a family of four sons and four daughters. James Maxwell Anderson was born on December 15, 1888, in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, to Reverend William Lincoln (Link) Anderson and Perrimela (Premma) Stephenson.

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