Anderson Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio

210 p. Introduction by Irving Howe.Winesburg, Ohio (full title: Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life) is a 1919 short story cycle by the American author Sherwood Anderson. 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. It is set in the fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio (not to be confused with the actual Winesburg), which is based loosely on the author's childhood memories of Clyde, Ohio.The cycle consists of twenty-two short stories, one of which consists of four parts: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 WillardThe book is written as a third-person omniscient narrative with the narrator occasionally breaking away from the story to directly address the reader or make self-conscious comments (in "Hands", after describing the poignant nature of the story, he writes that "It is a job for a poet", later in the same story adding, "It needs a poet there".) These remarks appear less often as the book progresses.Though each story's title notes one character, there are a total of over 100 characters named in the book, some appearing only once and some recurring several times. According to literary scholar Forrest L. Ingram, "George Willard [recurs] in all but six stories; 33 characters each appear in more than one story (some of them five and six times). Ninety-one characters appear only once in the cycle (ten of these are central protagonists in their stories)." Within the stories, characters figure in anecdotes that cover a relatively large time period; much of the action takes place during George's teenage years, but there are also episodes that go back several generations (particularly in "Godliness"), approximately twenty years ("Hands"), and anywhere in between. Indeed, the climactic scenes of two stories, "The Strength of God" and "The Teacher", are actually juxtaposed over the course of one stormy January evening. As Malcolm Cowley writes in his introduction to the 1960 Viking edition of Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson's "instinct was to present everything together, as in a dream".