Winesburg, Ohio
- Feb 19, 2018
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 8
★★★★☆
I didn’t know a thing about Sherwood Anderson, or Winesburg, Ohio, when I added the book to my reading list back in 2009. I found it, along with other more familiar classics, from Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels, which seemed as good a place as any from which to draw. Anderson’s most-celebrated book finally got its turn in mid-January when I was able to secure a copy through my local library (via interlibrary loan). It was a large type edition, which was an irritation, but not nearly as big an irritation as finding, 80 pages in, that another book’s signature—about the Vietnam War, no less—had been inadvertently inserted during bindery. The next day I returned to the library, and so began the hunt for another copy. It would be more than three weeks before a new edition was in my hands, paperback this time, and, thankfully, not in large print.
Published in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio is both one of the earliest short story cycles and, because of its emphasis on psychological insights over plot, as well as its plain-spoken prose, one of the earliest works of modern literature. Anderson’s collection influenced an entire generation of American writers including Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, and that neither book nor author is as widely read as those aforementioned titans of literature is a damn shame because Winesburg, Ohio is a gem.
Over 22 loosely connected stories (young town reporter George Willard is the red thread), Anderson gets at the heart and soul of the citizens of his fictitious northern Ohio town, examining their loneliness and isolation, their inability to communicate, their longing for connection (frequently of a sexual nature), and their desire to escape—from their lives, from their relationships, from their town, and sometimes from themselves. As you might expect, the overall mood is melancholy, with an air of desperation suffusing everyone and everything. And though most (all?) of the characters fail to find either peace or satisfaction, the result is hardly depressing. Anderson has a real affection for these people—he knows them, as he knows himself—and it’s a credit to his gifts as a writer that he so deftly conjures sympathy without succumbing to sentimentality. It is precisely this lack of sentimentality that makes Winesburg, Ohio so powerful. There are no apologies offered, no excuses made for these tragic, unsatisfied, unfulfilled lives who, longing, hoping, striving, failing, are as full of life and blood and heart today as they were a hundred years ago.
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