Before Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Ford, there was Sherwood Anderson, who, with Winesburg, Ohio, charted a new direction in American fiction--evoking with lyrical simplicity quiet moments of epiphany in the lives of ordinary men and women. In a bed, elevated so that he can peer out the window, an old writer contemplates the fluttering of his heart and considers, as if viewing a pageant, the inhabitants of a small midwestern town. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon. "Nothing quite like it has ever been done in America," wrote H. L. Mencken. "It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own."
Published in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson'smasterpiece, a work in which he achieved the goal to whichhe believed all true writers should aspire: to see and feel "allof life within." In a perfectly imagined world, an archetypalsmall American town, he reveals the hidden passions thatturn ordinary lives into unforgettable ones. Unified by therecurring presence of young George Willard, and played outagainst the backdrop of Winesburg, Anderson's loosely connectedchapters, or stories, coalesce into a powerful novel.
In such tales as "Hands," the portrayal of a rural berrypicker still haunted by the accusations of homosexuality thatended his teaching career, Anderson's vision is as acutetoday as it was over eighty-five years ago. His intuitive abilityto home in on examples of timeless human conflicts--aworkingman deciding if he should marry the woman who isto bear his child, an unhappy housewife who seeks lovefrom the town's doctor, an unmarried high school teachersexually attracted to a pupil--makes this book not onlyimmensely readable but also deeply meaningful. An importantinfluence on Faulkner, Hemingway, and others who weredrawn to Anderson's innovative format and psychologicalinsights, Winesburg, Ohio deserves a place among the frontranks of our nation's finest literary achievements.
Introduction by JeffreyMeyers
THE TALES AND THE PERSONS
The Book of the Grotesque
HANDS--concerning Wing Biddlebaum
PAPER PILLS--concerning Doctor Reefy
MOTHER--concerning Elizabeth Willard
THE PHILOSOPHER--conceming Doctor Parcival
NOBODY KNows--concerning Louise Trunnion
GODLINESS,a Tale in Four Parts
Ⅰ--concerning Jesse Bentley
Ⅱ—also concerning Jesse Bentley
Ⅲ Surrender--concerning Louise Bentley
Ⅳ Terror--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