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    Winesburg, Ohio
    Winesburg, Ohio
    Winesburg, Ohio
    Ebook252 pages4 hours

    Winesburg, Ohio

    By Sherwood Anderson

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    Sherwood Anderson’s most famous work, “Winesburg, Ohio” is a cycle of short stories set in the fictional town of Winesburg, loosely based on the author’s own home town of Clyde, Ohio. A picture of small town America during the first part of the 20th century, the series of short stories revolves around the life George Willard, from youth, through his yearning for independence, to his eventually departure from the town. Each story tells the tale of a distinct member of the town as related to George, a young reporter for the “Winesburg Eagle”. Through this device the author establishes a frame in which George acts as a recorder of the other town members’ narratives and which also acts as a foil for his own coming-of-age story. Central to all the stories are the themes of loneliness and isolation which permeate the existence of small-town life. Belonging to both the modernist and realist literary traditions, “Winesburg, Ohio” is a work which in a way defies classification, being at once both a novel and a series of short stories. Generally well received upon its first publication in 1919, the work over time has come to be regarded as a classic of modern American literature. This edition includes an introduction by Ernest Boyd and a biographical afterword.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateSep 21, 2020
    ISBN9781420976328
    Author

    Sherwood Anderson

    Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio. Following a brief stint in the Spanish American War, he started a family and founded a business -- both of which he abruptly abandoned at the age of 36 to pursue his life-long dream of writing. His simple and direct writing style, with which he portrayed important moments in the lives of his characters, influenced both Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. His other notable works include Triumph of the Egg; Horses and Men; and A Story Teller's Story.

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    Reviews for Winesburg, Ohio

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      The author Sherwood Anderson led an interesting life. He was born in 1876, America’s Centennial Year, to a father who was a veteran of the Civil War, and a mother who later took in laundry to make ends meet while her husband drank. After growing up in small town Ohio, he followed his brother to Chicago and began working factory jobs while going to night school to further his education. He left to join the Army for the Spanish American War, and then returned to Chicago to begin a career in advertising and sales. In his spare time he began writing. It wasn’t until his 40s that his first book was published.He found his first real success with the work that he is mainly remembered today - the short story collection in Winesburg, Ohio. The publisher of his first two books refused to publish Winesburg, calling it “too gloomy”. It was Ben Heubsch, owner of a small publishing house in New York, who gave the book its title and published it to effusive critical reception. Anderson has been considered by some critics to be more significant for his influence on a younger generation of writers than for any of his own works. Those he influenced include Hemingway, Faulkner, and Sandburg, who he and his third wife entertained at their apartment in New Orleans in the 1920s. He was married four times, taking full advantage of the new sexual freedom of the Roaring Twenties. He died in 1941 of peritonitis while on a cruise in the Caribbean. In 1998, Modern Library chose Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio as #24 on their list of 100 Best Novels. It’s in fact not a novel, but a series of interconnecting short stories. Each is a character study focused on a particular individual. Every one of Anderson’s characters has their secrets, every one has their disappointments. Taken together the stories provide a sense of the loneliness and frustration hiding beneath the surface of small town pre-industrial life. The stories are heartbreakingly real, and written in simple, matter-of-fact language that I found distinctly Midwestern. In many of the stories young George Willard, an eager newspaper reporter, and stand-in for the author, plays a part. People come to him and unload their tales. George himself is a character in the tales of his mother and himself that finish out the book.I really enjoyed these stories. I know some find them depressing, but remember when they were written, with World War I raging and America undergoing enormous change - from agriculture to industry and from rural to urban. Stories looking back to small town life between the Civil War and World War I, and seeing it with all its shortcomings, make perfect sense given the times. But for me the realness of the stories Anderson captured makes them timeless.
    • 4/5
      The stories in Winesburg, Ohio, tell of a restless longing for something that the characters can’t quite define, but which may be community or connection. It has an aura of disappointment verging on despair. The town is filled with lonely souls who seem detached from everyone around them, except for young reporter George Willard, who seems to be the last remaining thread connecting the people of Winesburg. What will happen to the town when George Willard leaves?Anderson seems to capture the beginning of the Midwest’s shift from agricultural economy to manufacturing economy and the waning of its small towns. Everyone with Midwestern roots ought to read this book.
    • 5/5
      I know many of my friends did not enjoy this collection as much as I did. They called the interconnected stories "depressing." I chose to focus on the glimpses of small town life and the beautiful way the author painted the picture with adjectives and other words. George Willard appears in most of the stories, and we gain lots of insights into his character through the course of the book. I found a lot of truth in the small town life depiction even a century later. While I know many will disagree with my high rating, this one resonated with me.
    • 4/5
      A collection of short stories about the citizens of the small town. What most of the stories have in common is that each character has something that makes them feel isolated and often desperately unhappy, whether this is a bad marriage or an unsuccessful career or unrequited love. While some readers have found this a depressing book, and it certainly isn't a happy one, there are little unexpected touches of humor, and a lot more sex than you'd expect in a book published in 1919.
    • 4/5
      Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson was originally published in 1919 and consists of 22 short stories loosely connected by setting and characters. One character, George Willard, appears in all but 6 of the stories, and we read about his growing up years and his observations in the small fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio. From the moment of reading the first story, “The Book of the Grotesque” the author sets the stage for his series of less than flattering stories about the loneliness and isolation that can exist in a small town.Anderson is reputed to have strongly influenced authors such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Wolfe by his modern style of writing. Nothing here is over-written or padded with flowery descriptions. The themes that Anderson explores are mostly connected with the inability to communicate and feeling that one doesn’t fit in. While on the surface life moves gently along in this small town, underneath there is darkness, jealousy, and unfulfilled yearnings.While I can certainly see the uniqueness of Winesburg, Ohio, I can’t say that I enjoyed the book as I found the various stories rather depressing. Personally I would have preferred some of the stories to express a little lightness or humor but these loosely connected stories about the troubled characters of Winesburg, Ohio is well worth the read.
    • 4/5
      Series of interconnected stories set in the early part of the 20th century (preindustrial) small town, Ohio. Themes of loneliness and isolation even though these characters are living in a small town.The work is structured around the life of protagonist George Willard, from the time he was a child to his growing independence and ultimate abandonment of Winesburg as a young man.Because of its emphasis on the psychological insights of characters over plot, and plain spoken prose, Winesburg, Ohio is known as one of the earliest works of Modernist literature. It is also a forerunner of the novel made up of a bunch of interconnected short stories. The cycle consists of twenty-two short stories, one of which consists of four parts:[note 1]The Book of the GrotesqueHands—concerning Wing BiddlebaumPaper Pills—concerning Doctor ReefyMother—concerning Elizabeth WillardThe Philosopher—concerning Doctor ParcivalNobody Knows—concerning Louise TrunnionGodlinessParts I and II—concerning Jesse BentleySurrender (Part III)—concerning Louise BentleyTerror (Part IV)—concerning David HardyA Man of Ideas—concerning Joe WellingAdventure—concerning Alice HindmanRespectability—concerning Wash WilliamsThe Thinker—concerning Seth RichmondTandy—concerning Tandy HardThe Strength of God—concerning The Reverend Curtis HartmanThe Teacher—concerning Kate SwiftLoneliness—concerning Enoch RobinsonAn Awakening—concerning Belle Carpenter"Queer"—concerning Elmer CowleyThe Untold Lie—concerning Ray PearsonDrink—concerning Tom FosterDeath—concerning Doctor Reefy and Elizabeth WillardSophistication—concerning Helen WhiteDeparture—concerning George WillardWritten third person omniscient narrative.
    • 4/5
      This book grew on me, a steady crescendo to a final couple of chapters that were beautifully crafted. A narration style that captures the animalistic frustration and self-contained disasters of growing up in a small town.
    • 2/5
      As a steadfast lover of Death in the Woods and Other Stories, I was sorely disappointed with this. No doubt Anderson's talent for bringing the reader to the moment of epiphany with a character is present. Furthermore, his ability to evoke emotion with seemingly simple descriptions of the physical is also manifest, and the book will most certainly arch the eyebrows of those who think that we were oh-so-much more pure and civilized in the ever-golden past. However, despite all those redeeming characteristics, the work as a whole simply does not gel. The individual stories, more often than not, only make sense within the context of each other, so they fail to satisfy as complete tales. Yet they also lack the necessary cohesion to form a novel. So while the portrait of a town is indeed painted, it is not made of interest.Those who have only read this Sherwood Anderson title might consider giving Death in the Woods a try. I find it to be a vastly superior work.
    • 5/5
      This is one I come back to every once in a while. I read it on the web the last time. It's more than just a portrait of a town. It's poetry. You come to feel like you know the people and their relationships. Life is hard in a small town, but there are perks.
    • 5/5
      The themes and concepts about humanity and society in these stories are fascinating and ageless.
    • 3/5
      Somehow I had never read this book, so im glad it got picked for one of my book clubs. Sherwood Anderson describes life in a small Ohio town that is ostensibly based on his own hometown. It is not a pleasant portrait. The action in the book takes place almost entirely at night, sand the darkness reflects the lives of most of the book's characters. There is lying, cheating, illicit sex and just about every other vice you can think of. No wonder the people in Anderson's home town were appalled when this book came out. A very depressing, yet accurate look at the venial life in a small town.
    • 3/5
      An interesting book of short stories about small-town life in the rural area of Winesburg, Ohio. Very introspective, with much of the intrigue based within the minds of the characters. It was good, but personally there was nothing especially noteworthy about the book. Nonetheless, worth a read.
    • 4/5
      Short stories wrapped around a town in Ohio.
    • 3/5
      I can see why this would have been scandalous back in 1919. There's an awful lot of earthy sexuality in Winesburg.

      Men and women are instantly struck by each other's attractiveness and they fall in and out of lust at the drop of a hat. There a depth to such human shallowness that even reminded me of War and Peace and the way Tolstoy was so sharp on the tiny things that trigger feelings of love.

      It's a great companion piece to the Spoon River Anthology which I read last year delving into overlapping lives with overlapping vignettes.

      The short story "The Untold Lie" is worth the price of admission all by itself.
    • 4/5
      Much better than I expected. This book of short stories both showed its age and defied it. It was packed with more sex, more honestly confused people, and more ambiguous moments than I expected. At the same time, that sex, confusion, and ambiguity was more obviously privileged, white, and male than I was comfortable with.In the penultimate story, the narrator observes of a young woman, "it seemed to her that the world was full of meaningless people saying words." Perhaps this applies to all the characters in the novel, or perhaps we're encouraged to believe that young newspaper reporter who is nearly the main character and seems to be the chronicler of the town's adventures is a different sort of man.Such moments of keen insight were too often surrounded by passages that feel more subtly sinister in the winter of 2017: "The young man took Mary Hardy into his arms and kissed her. When she struggled and laughed, he but held her the more tightly. For an hour the contest between them went on..." Over and over, women are waiting for men to deliver them from their lives. Maybe that is merely an accurate reflection of a time when women couldn't vote, unmarried women could rarely own property or conduct business, and rarely attended college. But at several moments in the story, it all felt more sinister to me.I wish I'd read these stories a decade ago. I suspect I would have loved them without the complicated mixed emotions I have now.
    • 4/5
      I did not know what to think when I began reading Winesburg, Ohio. Hemingway's satire of the novel in The Torrents of Spring had somewhat tainted my first impression of the book. However, on completion I found the book thoughtful, interesting, and, aside from being somewhat vanilla in its description of life in a small American town, insightful. There is a coherence to the various stories that I found in Calvino's Marcolvaldo, despite the work appearing as a collection of short stories based around a protagonist and their relationship to the people, places and happenings in one particular town. I would not be surprised if Calvino was inspired by Anderson. But for the life of me I cannot understand Hemingway's criticism. Yet Anderson had a similar response from Faulkner. I think what makes this work so important is the background story, yet the work speaks to the reader in its own right.
    • 4/5
      This has been on my mental list of "to-reads" for a very long time. As a native of Ohio, I have a familiarity with the area and and with Sherwood Anderson, so I was excited to finally read this fantastic piece of literature.
    • 4/5
      Anderson shows a deep understanding of people and what drives them. Each character is unique and filled out so completely that I feel as though I understand every one on a level much deeper than the length of their presence in the book would suggest. Their is also an attention to language in the prose that is lovely to read. It's not always poetic, but it is always beautiful, and it cuts through to the heart of whatever is being said in that moment.

      My favorite quote from the books comes from the chapter titled "Death, concerning Doctor Reefy and Elizabeth Willard":
      "Their bodies were different, as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker.

      I would suggest this to anyone looking to feel less alone in the world, anyone who is confused and feels lost, or anyone who just needs something they can't explain.
    • 3/5
      It's hard to find those kind of books where the action slowly meanders through the streets and fields, and doesn't come blasting out of weapons, or splash through in a rapid pace, firing wit at a whiplash pace. Winesburg, Ohio shapes the character of a small town through its characters, told slowly and gently through short story glimpses. I love a quiet paced book, with good writing, and even though this was really vignettes/short stories, it still had the gentle quality I long for in today's action packed world.Almost embarrassed to admit, I might not have picked this up were it not for the Stanford Book Salon. I read in someone's review that the author died from peritonitis after his intestine was perforated by a piece of a toothpick left in a martini olive. I just want to reassure everyone that knows about the czuk "Martini Night" ritual on (most) Fridays, that we do not toothpick our Castlevietro olives.
    • 4/5
      This book has much of Elyria, Ohio in it. At least that seems to be the case. I was raised in Elyria and Anderson writes of a typical turn-of-the-century (last century, that is) American Midwest city with its prejudices and glories. If one wishes to understand the evolution of the American being, read this book.
    • 5/5
      WINESBURG, OHIO-by Sherwood Anderson 479 -12706019I was skeptical of this book because I thought the title sounded dull and the generic title even more dull-dom. However, I decided to read it only because I am from a small town in Ohio. It turns out, I am happy I live in Ohio. The stories are detailed with realistic, well-rounded characters. Typically I steer away from short stories as many times it seems the endings are simple cutoff. This author delivers. His stories, though short, are well formed and entertaining. I was taken back to a different time of life, perhaps better in some ways as I read through.
    • 2/5
      I trudged through this. I'm sure it was quite realistic and risque in 1919, but the repeated hand imagery annoyed me, as did the whole premise of trying to describe the inner emotional lives of interconnected people in vignettes. Give me PLOT, please! And don't tell me it was a coming of age story, George was an idiot.
    • 4/5
      A collection of interconnected short stories, set in the post-WWI years in a small town in Ohio. Some of the stories are a little bit dated, but still a good read--a slice of time and place.
    • 3/5
      Oddly compelling set of very short stories set in rural America at the dawn of agricultural industrialization. Themes center on love, family religion, values and lack thereof. Also a kind of one hit wonder for Anderson.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this collection of short stories about the fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio. The way the story lines interconnected fascinated me. The descriptions of the townspeople's actions emotions were so intriguing that sometimes I felt like a voyeur.
    • 4/5
      THE BEST LAID PLANS

      A man and woman meet at a bar. They begin to talk and learn that each has trouble staying in long-term relationships because their sexual tastes are considered deviant. Excited, they decide to return to the woman’s apartment. After a bit of heavy petting, the woman excuses herself to her bedroom, promising to return wearing something more appropriate. Minutes pass and the woman emerges from her room in dominatrix attire to find the man nude, spent and smoking a cigarette. Incensed, she admonishes him for finishing without her. He replies, "Lady, I don’t know what your idea of kinky is but I just fucked your cat and shit in your purse."

      *****

      Bakersfield, California

      The man closes the book. He is at the car wash. His daughter dances in front of him, hopping from colored tile to colored tile in the run down, if air conditioned, interior of the building. He remembers the dreams of youth.

      He remembers standing on a hillside in Corona Del Mar and looking down upon a gigantic house under construction as his father tells him he is meant to be a writer. A plywood turret of what is to become a huge personal library is framed by the hazy blue of the Pacific Ocean. The house will be that of Dean Koontz, who would go on to write the Afterword for the 2005 Signet Classic Edition of Winesburg, Ohio.

      The man remembers boyhood, when the dream of being a writer was new. He is eleven. He and his parents have moved to the working class community of South Gate. For the first time, he applies himself to his schoolwork. He wins a city-wide essay contest and is rewarded with an article in the newspaper and a free lasagna dinner. His parents, whose marriage is failing, declare a temporary truce and whisper with one another about their destined-for-greatness son. Almost as impressively, a biologically precocious Latina he goes to school with named Claudia asks him to sleep with her. Blushing, he buries his head in his desk. He does not know what it is to sleep with a girl, he only knows that Catherine Bach of Dukes of Hazard fame has made him feel funny on several different occasions.

      One day he is accosted at the school bus stop by another boy named Jose who is jealous of the attentions of the resident alpha-female. Jose is beaten bloody and chased home by the boy. The school bus shows up just as Jose's family spill from their house, whipped into a bloodlust that the most fervent mujahideen would envy. As the eldest brother approaches the departing bus, his eyes meet the boy's through a window. The boy answers his foreign slanders by sticking out his tongue.

      The boy did not become a writer. The man he became thinks of all the things he has left unsaid and of all the feelings he has never shown. He is at the hardware store. He buys a drain snake because his Hispanic wife's hair has clogged the shower. He is mildly irked, but he loves her. He loves his daughter. He loves his life. Old friends are coming over today and he will laugh. He thinks that anyone who has read Winesburg, Ohio and given it less than four stars probably only has sex like Jesus is in the room working the lights.
    • 4/5
      I loved Infinite Jest, so naturally I loved Winesburg, Ohio. Sherwood Anderson is clearly David Foster Wallace’s doppelganger, displaced eighty years in the past, and two states away, but possessing a very similar melancholy sense of humanity, and even a kindred narrative style. The more I reflect on these two novels, the more parallels I find. One’s about drugs, entertainment, and sexual deviance in fast-paced urban Boston of the near future. The other’s about isolation, disappointment and sexual repression in the leisurely and pastoral Winesburg, Ohio of circa 1915. Their window dressings may differ, but their hearts are both pervaded with a deep sense of loneliness and disconnection. Unconvinced? Let me see if I can persuade you. While both novels tend to bounce around between multiple story threads, some of which connect up in unexpected ways, each has a frontrunner candidate for the title of protagonist. Hal Incandenza and George Willard are both intelligent young men, raised by distant mothers and successful yet frustrated fathers. Each stands on the doorstep of adulthood, raked with uncertainty about how to go forward, and scarred by upbringings which have left them poorly-equipped emotionally to form healthy adult relationships. Both books contain naïve young women betrayed by their lovers. Alice Hindman lies on her bed, staring nightly at the wall, waiting in despair for years, abandoned and forgotten by Ned Currie, who really only ever wanted to bed her and move on. Joelle Van Dyne struggles alone with addiction and the bittersweet memories of Orin Incandenza, who bedded her, disfigured her, and has definitely moved on. Infinite Jest has Don Gately- the perpetually despondent rehab counselor, whose past secrets (drug addiction and manslaughter) impede him from forming close interpersonal bonds. Winesburg, Ohio has Wing Biddlebaum, a perpetually introverted and fidgety recluse, whose past secrets (untrue accusations that he molested students as a teacher) impede him from forming close interpersonal bonds.Are these parallels too much of a stretch? Too reductive? Maybe these two novels aren’t as similar as all that.. but they do have common themes, and more than anything else, they both leave me with a sense that Nature and History have ganged up to play a cruel joke on many of us: making us on one hand genetically and socially conditioned to congregate in packs, but on the other hand shaping our society to be so rigidly hierarchical, so full of oppressive demands and expectations, and governed by such complex unspoken nuances of manner and custom that the whole process of socializing and getting along in large groups hardly feels achievable to many, and hardly seems worthwhile to many others. Most of us ultimately find a livable balance between inputs and outputs: a tolerable equilibrium between the mental and physical energy we must expend, and the social and material life that they buy for us. We don’t quite live out our wildest dreams, but we get enough of what we need to soldier on. Frequently this involves either accepting that we can’t "have it all", or redefining our idea of what "having it all" means.That’s great for those who make it, but society and economics are hard, and not everybody ends up with the "happy-enough" ending. Some people give up on the standard prizes… the proverbial 2.3 kids and the house in the suburbs with the white picket fence. They follow some other dream, God bless ‘em, and some find their own happiness. Hermits, starving artists, nuns, and other eccentrics essentially say "fuck it". They haven’t found conventional happiness, and they’re done trying. I’m not sure whether this represents victory or defeat. Regardless, this book isn’t about those people; this book is about the people who can’t seem to attain the orthodox version of happiness, but don’t have a better dream to replace it with. It’s people who can’t quite master the rules of social success, but can’t or won't reject mainstream civilization and its prizes either.They keep following society’s rules, knowing on some level that the game is rigged against them, but following nonetheless, because they lack either the courage or imagination to take another path. Consider Ray Pearson: miserably married for decades to the girl he got pregnant, in a fleeting moment of passion. Consider Elmer Cowly: painfully awkward and overly-self conscious, who leaves his family and a secure job to head off into the night, dreaming of a distant city, where he might "… get work in some shop and become friends with the other workmen and would be indistinguishable. Then he could talk and laugh. He would no longer be queer and would make friends. Life would begin to have warmth and meaning for him as it had others." God damn; is that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard? It’s not so different from the kids at the Enfield Tennis Academy in Infinite Jest, is it? Those kids leave their families to attend the prestigious academy, placing all their hopes for deferred happiness in the dream of a career in professional tennis,"…this game the players are all at E.T.A. to learn, this infinite system of decisions and angles and lines Mario’s brothers worked so brutishly hard to master: junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without." Fuck. Kill me now, if that’s what it’s all about.This isn’t a philosophy book, but it’s written by an observant and philosophical author. I don’t directly identify with any of the characters; I’m generally satisfied with my life, even if the review suggests otherwise. So why did these assorted vignettes about sad, disenfranchised characters touch me so? Probably because I think our social systems deserve to have their warts pointed out. They’ve evolved as a successful way to maintain order over time, which has some benefits for the community at large, but is frequently cruel and stifling to the individual, who may pay a high price for overrated things like acceptance and a sense of belonging. Sherwood Anderson seems to be telling the great abstract System that it’s not as fucking awesome as it thinks it is; and even though I’ve bought into it (or sold out to it) in many ways, there’s a part of me which still holds out against it, and which thinks the System deserves this tongue lashing, and probably a lot worse. -Thanks, David!
    • 3/5
      I believe Mr Anderson is a very talented writer. I also think he touched on many subjects of interest to me and others. But, for the most part, as charming as it was and well-written, I felt it all too soft for me, kind of like a Little House on the Prairie if you want to know the truth. Perhaps a bit too sentimental and even a bit too romantic for me. I like dirt and music that not only lifts me but spreads a soiling on me too permanent to rub off. But I shall see how the book progresses in the further regions of my mind as it gestates, or not, come what may. Certainly a book worth reading and definitely a precursor to what was to come in the literary field of its time.
    • 3/5
      I waited too long to write my thoughts on this one and now I remember so little. But that in itself is a critique. Any book which doesn't stay with you was probably ho-hum at best.

      So which parts do I remember? Actually, I remember the four-part story "Godliness" best--the one about the grandfather who feels he has been chosen by God. I found it to be thought-provoking and suspenseful. Also memorable was the story about the minister who catches a glimpse of the neighbor woman and lusts after her.

      Ironically, many of the stories which focus on George Willard, the main character, escape me. The most memorable scenes from him were perhaps his final ones, as he walks around Winesburg by himself and also through the fair grounds with Helen.

      I thought I'd either love Winesburg or hate it; most people I know who have read it do. Instead, I fall in the middle. There were some great stories here, but overall, it just didn't capture me.
    • 4/5
      Every chapter in this book is a separate story that can stand on its own but they are linked together through a few central characters. The book takes place in the early 20th century and is a blazing indictment of small town life. This is a town where those who stay find their dreams crushed. The only chance you have is to move away. Even then we are not sure what happens to those who leave. Yes it is depressing, but it is just so well written that is worth the "downers".

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    Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

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    WINESBURG, OHIO

    A GROUP OF TALES OF OHIO SMALL TOWN LIFE

    By SHERWOOD ANDERSON

    Introduction by ERNEST BOYD

    Winesburg, Ohio

    By Sherwood Anderson

    Introduction by Ernest Boyd

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7465-2

    eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7632-8

    This edition copyright © 2021. Digireads.com Publishing.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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    THE TALES AND THE PERSONS

    INTRODUCTION

    THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE

    HANDS—concerning WING BIDDLEBAUM

    PAPER PILLS—concerning DOCTOR REEFY

    MOTHER—concerning ELIZABETH WILLARD

    THE PHILOSOPHER—concerning DOCTOR PARCIVAL

    NOBODY KNOWS—concerning LOUISE TRUNNION

    GODLINESS (PARTS I AND II)—concerning JESSE BENTLEY

    SURRENDER (PART III)—concerning LOUISE BENTLEY

    TERROR (PART IV)—concerning DAVID HARDY

    A MAN OF IDEAS—concerning JOE WELLING

    ADVENTURE—concerning ALICE HINDMAN

    RESPECTABILITY—concerning WASH WILLIAMS

    THE THINKER—concerning SETH RICHMOND

    TANDY—concerning TANDY HARD

    THE STRENGTH OF GOD—concerning THE REVEREND CURTIS HARTMAN

    THE TEACHER—concerning KATE SWIFT

    LONELINESS—concerning ENOCH ROBINSON

    AN AWAKENING—concerning BELLE CARPENTER

    QUEER—concerning ELMER COWLEY

    THE UNTOLD LIE—concerning RAY PEARSON

    DRINK—concerning TOM FOSTER

    DEATH—concerning DOCTOR REEFY and ELIZABETH WILLARD

    SOPHISTICATION—concerning HELEN WHITE

    DEPARTURE—concerning GEORGE WILLARD

    BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

    Introduction

    Sherwood Anderson was born at Clyde, Ohio, in 1876, and it was not until his fortieth year that his first book, Windy McPherson’s Son, was published. When that novel appeared its author was scarcely known beyond the small circle of readers who had seen his powerful stories in the little reviews which can afford out of their poverty to have the courage of their convictions. He was a contributor from the outset to T he Little Review, whose files contain so many of the names which now give contemporary American literature a quality and a significance that are truly national. It is noteworthy that many of the chapters in Winesburg, Ohio, the book which made his name, are reprinted from that and other periodicals of his experimental years. The legend is that Sherwood Anderson had a trunkful of fiction when he made his bid for fame with Windy McPherson’s Son in 1916, and the following year he issued Marching Men, followed In 1918 by a volume of poems, excellently entitled Mid-American Chants, That was the sum of Sherwood Anderson’s work when he published the book which now receives the consecration of being included in a library of the world’s modern classics.

    Just as the growth and development of America are rapid, so literary history moves quickly in this country, and in the space of five years the writer who was an innovator, an isolated figure, is now counted as one of a school of what is called the new American fiction. When Sherwood Anderson began there was only one novelist who could be seriously regarded as an original figure in modern American realistic fiction, and that was Theodore Dreiser. The latter was still the subject of vituperation and dispute, the single hope of those who believed that the purveyors of cheerful sentimentalities and of red-blooded adventures, were not the beginning and end of the national impulse towards a native American literature. Then there were but a few places in which such writers could obtain a hearing; now the weekly and monthly reviews of the adult type in New York can easily stand comparison with those of London. These years of destruction in Europe, by some law of compensation, have been years of creation and development in this country. The rise of a serious periodical literature, whose virtue is neither the eternal negation of conservatism nor the mere success of immense circulation, is part of what seems to be a genuine literary renascence in America.

    Sherwood Anderson’s work is typical of this renascence, this expression of America today in a literature which is no longer provincial but has its roots in the soil. In fiction this movement of independence has taken the form of realism, a resolute insistence upon the fundamentals of life, upon the facts so strenuously denied, or ignored, by the conventional imitators of British orthodoxy. It is essentially a literature of revolt against the great illusion of American civilization, the illusion of optimism, with all its childish evasion of harsh facts, its puerile cheerfulness, whose inevitable culmination is the school of glad books, which have reduced American literature to the lowest terms of sentimentality. A generation of poets, novelists and critics has arisen to repudiate these old idols of the literary market-place. The tentative and lonely efforts of such pioneers as Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser have opened up the way for a new literature. The speed at which American history moves, whether it be literary, political or social history, does not, of course, deprive history of the traditional privilege of repeating itself. Thus America today is witnessing such a conflict as was fought out in France during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when Flaubert and Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers and Zola, threw off the yoke of Romanticism. They were accused, as the younger Americans of today are accused, of various crimes, literary and intellectual. Their books were suppressed for moral reasons; they were denounced for their constant preoccupation with, the ugly, the drab and the uninspiring; in many cases they were dismissed by the critical mandarins because of their lack of style, their indifference to form. If they more frequently resisted their opponents successfully, as when Flaubert defeated the moral censors of Madame Bovary, it must be remembered that their fight was more specifically restricted to the domain of literature. In other words, the Romanticism which they had to conquer was a literary doctrine, not a national philosophy. The American realists have to contend with both, since this is the country in which life itself is viewed in terms of romantic fiction.

    Indeed, so long as American realism did not seem to embody any profound challenge to the national philosophy of romantic optimism, it was allowed to proceed unhindered. Hence the early regionalism of such writers as Sara Orne Jewett, whose notations of real life were in a minor key, barely audible in the student din of the popular fictioneers, each with a message of hope and gladness, and a considerable mechanical skill in translating the platitudes of the mob soothsayers into terms of machine-made romance. When the author of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt came forward with his dispassionate querying of all the assumptions of his contemporaries, it was easy to cloak moral indignation in aesthetic criticism, to perform the same ritual of excommunication as was attempted in France in the case of Zola, and even of Balzac, to some extent. But, in time, the influence of Dreiser triumphed over defects of form which are incredible only to those who have not submitted, as the true critic and sensitive reader must submit, to the compelling power of the creative genius. Chaotic, formless, at times banal, Theodore Dreiser has nevertheless, imposed a tradition of freedom, of sincerity, of objective documentation, which has given a new impulse to American fiction. His influence may be compared to the displacement effected by the pressure of the sheer weight of some elemental natural force.

    In his first two novels, Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men, as in his last, Poor White, Sherwood Anderson shows himself no mere imitator of Dreiser. Sam McPherson’s boyhood and youth in Canton, Iowa, where he is molded by the influence of that shiftless, braggart Windy McPherson, provides the occasion for a remarkable study of that mid-American life of which the author has become the interpreter. It is a projection of reality into the pages of a novel which immediately revealed the power and the potentialities of Sherwood Anderson. After his struggle for success in Chicago, Sam McPherson sets off upon a vague pilgrimage, abandoning his wife, and seeking some tangible answer to the riddle of an existence which cannot be satisfied, as every right-thinking citizen was taught to be, by mere success as defined by the prospectuses of the correspondence schools. The last portion of the book lacks the continuity of interest which gives its power to the earlier narrative portion, but what is a literary weakness serves only to emphasize the difference which separates such literature from the commonplace waves of the old school.

    It seems perverse to extend the story, not only beyond the point where the national philosophy receives its glow of warm satisfaction, but beyond the point; where craftsmanship is capable of its literary task. When one has nothing to say, but knows how to say it, no such dilemma can present itself. But that is just what makes these writers of the younger generation: they have so much to say that content is often unrestrained by mere form, much to the supercilious delight of the mandarins and the slick businessmen of letters. What are they to think, for example, of a novel like Marching Men, whose title raises expectations of conventional military glories? It is the curious story of Beaut McGregor, the miner’s son, whose groping adventure through life leads him to the idea of physical union in disciplined ranks as the means of creative solidarity amongst the laboring masses. Obviously Sherwood Anderson is as independent of the shibboleths of class-conscious radical fiction as of the no more unreal conventions of the circulationist novel.

    In Poor White, which followed Winesburg, Ohio, there are evident signs of the author’s increasing technical skill as a novelist. It is a fine study of the invasion of the pioneer American civilization by modern machinery and industrialism, as well as a superb analysis of the evolution of a human being from the decadent, rather than the primitive, barbarism of a poor white group. The book was slightly overshadowed at the moment of its appearance, by the more sensational eruption of the newcomers into this no longer fallow field of American literature, but it has qualities of a more profound character than its rivals of a season. Yet, in the last analysis, it is the stories of Sherwood Anderson which are his best achievement hitherto, and to that genre he has returned in his book, The Triumph of the Egg. The present collection of Winesburg stories gives the measure of his genius. In their unpremeditated narrative art they have a power of suggestion and revelation which we are accustomed to find in the great Russians, in Chekhov more than in Dostoyevsky, for there one admires the same economy of means, the same rich synthesis of life.

    Winesburg, Ohio is like that wheel of many colors, of which Anatole France writes, which had only to revolve to give a harmony of all the parts, which becomes the truth. These separate fragments of mid-American society combine to make a picture of American life which carries the inescapable conviction of reality. The stories are written out of the depths of imagination and intuition, out of a prolonged brooding over the fascinating spectacle of existence, but they combine that quality with a marvelous faculty of precise observation. Thus, the impression of surface realism is reinforced by that deeper realism which sees beyond and beneath the exterior world to the hidden reality which is the essence of things. Did not Schopenhauer, interpreting Goethe’s own confessions, point out that this is precisely the quality of the artist: that it is given to him alone to perceive the metaphysically Real—das Ding au sich?{1}

    ERNEST BOYD

    1919.

    The Book of the Grotesque

    The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window.

    Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a soldier in the Civil War, came into the writer’s room and sat down to talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.

    For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they talked of other things. The soldier got on the subject of the war. The writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried he puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous. The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed was forgotten and later the carpenter did it in his own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.

    In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For years he had been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a hard smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not of much use any more, but something inside him was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking about.

    The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during his long fife, a great many notions in his head. He had once been quite handsome and a number of women had been in love with him. And then, of course, he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know people. At least that is what the writer thought and the thought pleased him. Why quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?

    In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.

    You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.

    The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.

    For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.

    At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book which he called The Book of the Grotesque. It was never published, but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The book had one central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before. The thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be something like this:

    That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

    The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

    And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

    It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

    You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind that he himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He didn’t, I suppose, for the same reason that he never published the book. It was the young thing inside him that saved the old man.

    Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only mentioned him because he, like many of what are called very common people, became the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer’s book.

    Hands

    Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it’s falling into your eyes, commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangled locks.

    Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the New Willard House, he had formed something like a friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the Winesburg Eagle and sometimes in the evenings he walked out along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum’s house. Now as the old man walked up and down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he was hoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. After the wagon containing the berry pickers had passed, he went across the field through the tall mustard weeds and climbing a rail fence peered anxiously along the road to the town. For a moment he stood thus, rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the road, and then, fear overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the porch on his own house.

    In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty years had been the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured in the light of day into Main Street or strode up and down on the rickety front porch of his own house, talking excitedly. The voice that had been low and trembling became shrill and loud. The bent figure straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like a fish returned to the brook by the fisherman, Biddlebaum the silent began to talk, striving to put into words the ideas that had been accumulated by his mind during long years of silence.

    Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression.

    The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.

    When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or on the walls

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