Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
Summary
A cycle of interconnected stories set in a fictional small Ohio town follows an assortment of lonely, thwarted residents, whom Anderson names outright as grotesques, people who have seized on a single truth or obsession so tightly that it has warped the rest of them. Each story opens a different resident's private disappointment to view, a minister's unspoken doubt, a woman's decades old shame, a man who cannot stop his hands from reaching for things he cannot have, and threads a single connecting figure, the young newspaper reporter George Willard, through nearly all of them as a confidant the town's grotesques instinctively trust with what they cannot say to anyone else. The collection builds toward its final story, Departure, in which George, having absorbed the town's accumulated private grief across the book without fully understanding what he has been given, boards a train out of Winesburg for the city, his own artistic and adult life only just beginning as the book ends.
Anderson writes in a plain, confiding style stripped of Victorian ornament, closer to spoken testimony than to polished fiction, and that directness is what makes the characters' loneliness land; nothing about the prose distances a reader from what these people actually feel. It reads quickly story by story but accumulates real weight across the whole cycle, and the cycle's plain, confiding sentences taught a generation of American writers, Hemingway first among them, what unadorned prose could carry.
Anderson claimed he wrote most of the stories complete in single sittings at his Chicago boardinghouse, though surviving manuscripts show roughly two hundred revisions to Hands alone, and he set the book in a fictionalized version of Clyde, Ohio, where he had actually grown up between the ages of eight and nineteen.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer for the novel, then two years old, gave no award at all in 1920, the year Winesburg, Ohio would have been in contention, and the book received no prize of its own. B. W. Huebsch published it on May 8, 1919, after ten of the twenty two stories had already run individually in literary magazines; the poet Hart Crane wrote that America should read the book on her knees, and H. L. Mencken praised it as containing some of the most remarkable writing done in America, though other reviewers found it humorless and plotless, and it sold only around three thousand copies by 1921.
Anderson's reputation declined through the 1930s before a critical reexamination in the 1950s and 1960s restored the book to its current standing as a modernist classic, cited as a direct influence on both Ernest Hemingway's vernacular style and Ray Bradbury's structure for The Martian Chronicles. It ranked 24th on the Modern Library's 1998 list of the century's hundred best English language novels and has drawn stage adaptations including a 2002 Steppenwolf Theatre production.