Category: Winesburg Ohio

Sherwood Anderson’s book of short stories begins with an old writer thinking of the people he has known throughout his life. Particularly ingrained in his mind are the ‘grotesques’ of Winesburg, the small fictional town in Ohio that serves as the setting for each story. The writer is George Willard, who as a young man worked as a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle.

Winesburg, Ohio contains an array of interesting and unusual characters who all suffer from loneliness. Each person longs for meaningful human contact, whether from a friend or lover, to fill the aching gap in their lives. They all struggle from an inability to adequately voice this burning desire, and, as is the case in ‘Hands’, the story about the tragic life of the misunderstood former schoolteacher, Wing Biddlebaum, physical expression takes on great significance.

The position of George Willard is a fascinating one. As Winesburg’s only reporter, he is a close observer who tries to record the affairs of the townspeople, and his occupation gives him an air of eminence that leads many of them to confide in him. This character brings to mind the figure of John Singer in Carson McCullers’ 1940 novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, whose muteness elevates him as a kind of all-knowing being in the eyes of those he meets. However, what is clear in both texts is that neither men have life’s answers. Although undetected by others, both John and George are just as vulnerable to human weaknesses and regularly experience feelings of loneliness and doubt.

There are many other parallels between Winesburg, Ohio and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, especially the theme of loneliness and the absence of God. In Sherwood Anderson’s stories, many characters in their search for something to lift them above the monotony of everyday life pray in vain to a silent God. As small, quiet towns isolated from the hustle and bustle of the city, the novels’ respective settings are also particularly effective in emphasising the internal lives of characters who often have nothing else to do but think.

Anderson and McCullers also deploy simple writing styles that fit perfectly with the unpretentious tone of each text, and in doing so make both more powerful. McCullers even mirrors him by portraying hands as an important communicative and emotional link with one’s fellow man, as seen in John Singer’s backstory when he passionately communicates through sign language with his fellow silent friend, Spiros Antonapoulos.

Winesburg, Ohio is an extremely impressive achievement, and it should be read chronologically like a novel to feel the full impact of the short stories. Anderson’s depiction of loneliness may often be sad, but it also has its touching moments. In this small town he beautifully shows that pain, longing, and uncertainty are unavoidable aspects of what it means to be human, and that we must love and cherish life because it is the only one we have.

In the autumn of 1915, while living in a bohemian boardinghouse on Chicago’s Near North Side, Sherwood Anderson began work on a collection of tales describing the tortured lives of the inhabitants of Winesburg, a fictional Ohio town, in the 1890s. Drawing on his own experience growing up in the agricultural hamlet of Clyde, Ohio, he breathed life into a band of neurotic castaways adrift on the flatlands of the Midwest, each of them in their own way struggling — and failing — to locate meaning, personal connection and love amid the town’s elm-shaded streets.

These “grotesques,” as Anderson called them, had allowed doubt and fear to overwhelm their better instincts. They were, the writer believed, casualties of a close-minded culture, condemned to live out a lonely, alienated existence. “Winesburg” quickly became a cultural byword, a metaphor for the yawning emptiness of rural life.

Today that book, “Winesburg, Ohio,” is a staple of high school English classes and an acknowledged classic — No. 24 on the Modern Library’s list of 100 best American novels. But the path that the book, published a century ago on May 8, 1919, took to literary renown was anything but direct.

By the time the boutique publisher B.W. Huebsch read Anderson’s manuscript in August 1918, it had already been rejected on both sides of the Atlantic. Even London’s John Lane Company, which had put out Anderson’s previous works — two novels and a book of verse — when no New York publisher would touch them, dismissed it as “too gloomy.” But Huebsch, who had introduced American readers to James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, agreed to publish it.

Over its first two years the book, as skeptics had foreseen, sold a modest 5,000 copies. By contrast, Sinclair Lewis’s take on small-town life, “Main Street,” published a year later, surpassed 390,000 in sales during the same interval.

Anderson’s book fared little better with critics. Although some, including the literary kingmaker H.L. Mencken, lavished “Winesburg” with praise — “Here, indeed, is a piece of work that stands out from the common run of fiction like the Alps from the Piedmont plain,” he wrote — many reviewers were savage. The journalist Heywood Broun thought the book “monotonous,” while others complained that Anderson’s descriptions lacked depth and that his characters were one-dimensional “puppets with names.”

But the most vehement attacks targeted Anderson’s alleged preoccupation with sex. And indeed many of the “Winesburg” stories, in violation of the prevailing literary taboos, openly explored the destructive effects of stifled desire, sexual repression and perversion. Anderson became known as “the phallic Chekhov,” whose book, according to an anonymous reviewer in The New York Evening Post, “no man would wish to see in the hands of his daughter or sister.”

Perhaps nowhere was Anderson more despised than in his hometown, Clyde. The town’s head librarian burned copies of his book, and for many years, any patron of the Clyde Public Library who requested it was met with a scowl as she fumbled for the key to a locked closet where she stored, together with other “bad books,” a single copy that had somehow escaped the flames.

Writing in his memoirs two decades later, Anderson recalled that after “Winesburg” came out, “for weeks and months, my mail was loaded with letters calling me ‘filthy,’ ‘an opener of sewers.’” The criticism, he said, “made me ill.”

A hundred years on, it’s difficult to see what all the fuss was about. No modern reader would blush at Anderson’s treatment of sex, chaste by contemporary standards. “Winesburg” owes its longevity not to shock value but to how perfectly it captured a society on the brink of colossal change. Decades after the book’s publication, Waldo Frank, who had printed some of the early “Winesburg” stories in his magazine, The Seven Arts, remarked that Anderson had undertaken to describe “a Mid-American world that already then was a generation dead.”

Indeed, Winesburg — with its dirt roads, horses and gas lights, its farmers, shopkeepers and artisans — represented a rural culture soon to be swept by unprecedented social and technological ferment. When the superintendent of the United States census declared the American frontier closed in 1890, two-thirds of Americans still resided in small farm towns not unlike Winesburg. But by 1920, for the first time in the nation’s history, the majority of Americans were living in urban areas.

A number of factors contributed to this demographic shift, including a boom in American industry during World War I, which drew millions of workers to cities in search of jobs, large numbers of immigrants arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe, and the Great Migration of nearly half a million African-Americans from the South (including a staggering 10.4 percent of the combined black population of Alabama and Mississippi) to cities in the Midwest and the West and along the Eastern Seaboard.

At the same time, daily life was speeding up. In 1900 the horse remained the primary means of travel, and fewer than 14,000 automobiles — which most people viewed as playthings of the rich — bumped along the nation’s rutted roads; by 1920 there were nine million. Passenger trains more than doubled their ridership and tripled the number of miles traveled in the decade before the 1920 census, helping to make the railroads the country’s largest industry and biggest employer. Electric streetcars, first deployed in 1888, were now rumbling through thousands of towns and cities, heralding the age of the commuter. The noise and filth of urban living, helped along by the prejudices of affluent city dwellers seeking to escape growing racial and ethnic diversity downtown, led to the advent of “streetcar suburbs,” whose quiet, tree-lined avenues mimicked the small-town aesthetic of days gone by.

Other innovations, too — telephones, electric lights, subways, running water, sewage lines, paved streets, even house numbers — transformed how Americans lived. A combination of rising wages and shorter work weeks created a new class of consumers, people with the time and money to partake of all of those products spilling out of factories around the country.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Anderson was also caught up in the new “money hunger,” rising to become the owner of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. But in 1913, after a nervous breakdown, he deserted his wife and children and moved to Chicago. There he fell into a literary milieu that the critic Carl Van Doren called “the revolt from the village,” made up of newcomers to the city who, like Anderson, trained their writerly attentions on the rural settings they had left behind. Its chief exponent was the poet Edgar Lee Masters and his “Spoon River Anthology,” published in 1915, a collection of verse ostensibly in the voices of villagers buried in the cemetery of a fictional Illinois small town. The book, with its dark view of small-town life, became an unlikely international best seller and inspired Anderson to begin writing the stories that were to become “Winesburg, Ohio.”

The village revolt soon ran its course, as did Anderson’s career. He continued to publish and enjoyed a few years of fame in the 1920s, even if his books, with the exception of his 1925 novel “Dark Laughter,” never sold well. He was soon overtaken by younger writers: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck — all took inspiration from “Winesburg,” with its simple, declarative rhythms and steadfast concern for the plight of common people.

Hemingway and Faulkner, in particular, sought Anderson’s advice and support, which he happily provided, acting as a mentor to both and helping to get their first books into print. As their fortunes rose and his declined, they sought to distance themselves from Anderson with novels that cruelly mocked his personality and his prose style: Faulkner’s “Mosquitoes” and Hemingway’s “The Torrents of Spring.”

Anderson died in March 1941 of an intestinal infection, having accidentally swallowed a toothpick at a New York cocktail party. But his literary influence continued to be felt — something Faulkner himself later acknowledged. In December 1950, accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, he told the audience in Stockholm’s City Hall that he and his entire generation of American writers were “all of us children of Sherwood Anderson.”

Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of loosely interconnected short stories that focus on the troubled inhabitants of a small midwestern town. Although each of the 25 stories focuses on a different character, the novel’s central plot arc is protagonist George Willard’s gradual coming-of-age.

In “The Book of the Grotesque,” an elderly writer in town has a dreamlike vision of a grotesque figure, which he records in a book. The writer believes that truth is man-made and that becoming possessed by any one singular principle will lead to the corruption and destruction of the individual, a revelation he incorporates into a book of “grotesques”.

In “Hands,” Wing Biddlebaum is alienated from the Winesburg community due to his strange habit of relentlessly moving his hands. After absentmindedly reaching out to touch George Willard during one of their conversations, Wing is horrified, as many years ago he was driven out of his old life as a schoolteacher in Pennsylvania after he was accused of molesting a student. Wing now leads a broken, lonely existence after losing his reputation.

In “Paper Pills,” Doctor Reefy is possessed by a search for intellectual truth, constantly scribbling down his thoughts onto scraps of paper that he then rejects and leaves crumpled in his pockets or strewn around his office. Reefy courts a much younger woman who comes to his medical practice because she has accidentally become pregnant. The woman miscarries and she and Reefy are soon married. Reefy spends that winter happily sharing his philosophical musings with his new wife, but she tragically dies the following spring. After her death, he isolates himself and spends his days grieving alone in his office.

In “Mother,” George Willard’s parents, who have a dysfunctional marriage, own the New Willard House hotel in town. His mother Elizabeth is chronically ill and largely bedbound, while his father Tom resents his wife and their deteriorating life. Elizabeth’s isolation and resentment over her lost youth leads her to become extremely possessive over George, and she plots to stab Tom when he suggests that their son should get serious about his life and possibly move away from Winesburg.

In “The Philosopher,” Doctor Parcival has become embittered by his wild life full of loss, failures, and mistakes. He attempts to mentor George Willard by imparting the same sense of hatred that he feels toward life. After a little girl is killed in a buggy accident, Parcival refuses to help other doctors in town and fears that this will cause him to be hanged. He pleads with George to write the book that he may never get to write, asking him to remember that “everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.”

In “Nobody Knows,” George has sex with Louise Trunnion, a local teenage girl. After the act, George is ashamed, but he reassures himself that no one knows about their encounter.

In “Godliness, a Tale in Four Parts,” a four-part saga shifts the narrative back several generations to tell the story of Jesse Bentley, the owner of a farm outside of Winesburg. Jesse has a greedy motivation for wealth, but is also possessed by a prophetic vison of himself as an Old Testament figure who must serve God, to the detriment of his family. His daughter Louise has a troubled childhood and feels trapped in her role as a wife and mother, resulting in her son David going to live on the Bentley farm with his grandfather. Jesse views David as the son he never had and hopes that he will help him fulfill his prophecy, but his attempts to forge a righteous path for his grandson ultimately result in David fleeing the Bentley farm.

In “A Man of Ideas,” Joe Welling is a source of annoyance for many people in Winesburg, as he has an irritating habit of cornering people and going on long, philosophical diatribes. Joe starts a baseball team and begins a relationship with Sarah King in hopes of gaining more respect from the townsmen. Although Sarah comes from a sinister, potentially dangerous family, Joe is able to win over her father and brother through his outgoing nature.

In “Adventure,” after Alice Hindman is abandoned by her teenage lover Ned Currie, she spends the next decade deteriorating mentally and becoming completely isolated. When joining a local church does not give Alice the meaning she craves, she decides that she needs a spontaneous adventure. Alice decides to strip off her clothes and run outside into the rain, but quickly regrets her actions, resigning herself to being one of the many people who are destined to “live and die alone.”

In “Respectability,” Wash Williams has become deeply misogynistic since his wife cheated on him. When he sees George Willard kissing Belle Carpenter, he takes it upon himself to warn George about the dangers of trusting women. Though he hopes to inspire the same hatred in George, the young man is only left feeling sickened and disturbed by Wash’s ranting.

In “The Thinker,” after the death of his father, Seth Richmond’s behavior becomes erratic and his mother struggles to rein in her teenage son. Seth feels alienated from his peers and wants to get out of Winesburg to start a new life. When George Willard tells him that he wants to fall in love with Helen White, Seth becomes jealous and goes to see Helen himself. Seth is disappointed when Helen encourages him to leave Winesburg instead of urging him to stay. Seth reflects that while George will likely find love, he is fated to be alone forever.

In “Tandy,” the young daughter of an atheist is given a prophecy by a drunken stranger who wanders into town. He tells the little girl that she could grow up to be the great woman he has foreseen and he encourages her to be Tandy, the name by which he refers to the qualities of bravery, strength, and openness to love. The stranger’s vision gives the young girl a newfound sense of purpose amidst her nihilistic environment and she demands to be called “Tandy” thereafter.

In “The Strength of God,” Reverend Curtis Hartman experiences a crisis of faith after he sees the schoolteacher Kate Swift reading and smoking a cigarette in her bedroom. He is thrown into a sexual obsession with Kate that culminates in him surrendering to sin and waiting for a glimpse of her in the church bell tower across from her bedroom window. Hartman is shocked to see Kate naked and praying, a sight that leads Hartman to a spiritual epiphany. He runs out of the church, exclaiming to George Willard that Kate is an instrument of God.

“The Teacher” retells “The Strength of God” from an alternative point of view, focusing on the events of George Willard’s life leading up to Reverend Hartman’s proclamation. George has entered into a relationship with his former schoolteacher Kate Swift that leaves both of them confused over their gap in maturity. George has just had a fight with Kate when Hartman bursts into the Winesburg Eagle office and tells George that she is a divine instrument, a proclamation that leaves George even more confused.

In “Loneliness,” Enoch Robinson moves away from Winesburg to New York City in order to attend art school. His egocentric, childlike nature prevents him from fully connecting with others and he creates imaginary friends to talk to in lieu of stable relationships. Enoch eventually leaves his wife and children and has a mental breakdown at the loss of his imaginary “shadow people.” Enoch, left distraught and alone, returns to Winesburg and shares his life story with George Willard.

In “An Awakening,” George Willard is casually dating Belle Carpenter, a young woman who is only interested in George because it makes her suitor Ed Hanby jealous. One night, George goes out walking and has the profound revelation that the same laws exist at all levels of the universe, and that becoming a man means incorporating himself into this natural order. George’s newfound confidence inspires him to pursue Belle more assertively, which works in his favor until Ed spots them together and attacks him. George is left humiliated and vows that he will hate Belle for the rest of his life.

In “Queer,” Elmer Cowley is the son of a family that is alienated from the Winesburg community due to their peculiar nature and the equally peculiar store that they own. As a newcomer, Elmer has failed to make any friends and feels a deep sense of alienation. He arbitrarily blames his loneliness on George Willard, who he believes epitomizes the town that ostracizes him. In an act of rebellion, Elmer robs his father’s store, beats up George, and flees Winesburg on a train, reassuring himself that he “ain’t so queer.”

In “The Untold Lie,” Ray Peterson and Hal Winters, laborers on a farm outside of Winesburg, are both conflicted about what their paths in life should be. While Ray is in the midst of an existential crisis about the opportunities he missed out on to get married and have children, Hal comes to the older man for advice about what he should do after accidentally getting a girl pregnant. Ray initially wants to warn Hal that getting married and having a family will trap him in a life he does not want. Ray realizes, however, that this would be a lie as he is truly fulfilled by the love he feels for his wife and children.

In “Drink,” a young man named Tom Foster moves with his grandmother to Winesburg after his parents die. Although his upbringing in Cincinnati was fairly troubled, he is a sweet (albeit irresponsible) boy who keeps to himself and is well-liked by the townspeople. Tom comes to view his innocence as a detriment to his growth and decides that he must get drunk in order to gain a better understanding of other people and the sorrows they face. After a drunken night in which he is looked after by George Willard, Tom believes that the experience has taught him a valuable lesson.

In “Death,” Elizabeth Willard begins to see Doctor Reefy for her chronic illness, and the two become fast friends. Elizabeth and Reefy bond over the fact that they are both alienated, misunderstood souls who are similarly paralyzed by the losses they have experienced in life. Reefy encourages Elizabeth to be open to the “divine accident” of love, but Elizabeth dies before the two can fully begin a romantic relationship.

In “Sophistication,” after Elizabeth Willard’s death, George is thrown into a crisis wherein he becomes acutely aware of his own mortality and feels that he must move on from his childhood in order to truly cross “the line into manhood.” Feeling a deep desire for connection and understanding, he seeks out Helen White, whom he has dated off and on throughout his adolescence. George and Helen spend a meaningful night together looking out over the empty grounds after the town fair, each coming to terms with their maturation and gaining a better understanding of their complementary roles as a man and a woman.

In “Departure,” George’s mother’s death and his meaningful last night with Helen White allow George Willard to fully move on from his childhood and embrace his newfound independence. George departs from Winesburg on an early morning train in hopes of starting a new life and finding a job on a city newspaper. While George is initially nostalgic, his ambivalence fades away as he feels ready to “paint the dreams of his manhood” on the distant background of his hometown.