Short stories
Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson · 1919
Opening lines
The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A prologue and twenty-one linked stories set around a small town in Ohio, connected by George Willard, a young reporter on the local newspaper, in whom many come to confide. A doctor writes thoughts on scraps of paper that he keeps in his pockets, a schoolteacher goes out to walk alone in the snowstorm, a telegraph operator tells of his hatred of women, a pastor breaks a corner of his belfry's stained-glass window to see into the neighbour's house, a lonely woman feels the urge rising to run naked in the rain.
Context
Ten of the stories first appeared, from 1916 to 1918, in The Masses, The Little Review and The Seven Arts. A first publisher refused the book as too dark; B. W. Huebsch published it on 8 May 1919, opened by a prologue on the grotesques: each has seized a truth and, in trying to live by it, has turned it into a lie. The town is inspired by Clyde, where the author grew up, and its inhabitants felt betrayed by it. Critics were divided, and the book became the model of the cycle of linked stories, to which In Our Time or Go Down, Moses are later linked.
Who it is for
Short, linked stories that can be read separately but shed light on one another. French translation by Marguerite Gay, since 1927.
Prizes and reception
The American classic of the linked-story collection and its author's most enduring work; twenty-fourth on the Modern Library list in 1998.
Sources for this page 4
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