Winesburg, Ohio (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

by Sherwood Anderson (Author), Glen A. Love (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the center is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's solitary figures. Anderson's stories influenced countless American writers including Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Oates and Carver. This new edition corrects errors made in earlier editions and takes into account major criticism and textual scholarship of the last several decades.

About the Author
Glen A. Love is Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is the author of New Americans: The Westerner and the Modern Experience in the American Novel, Babbitt: An American Life, and other works on American literature. He has taught in Germany, at the universities of Regensburg and Tubingen, under Fulbright grants.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; World's Classics edition (November 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192839772
• ISBN-13: 978-0192839770
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #629,581 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lives lost in the dark., October 3, 2005

By	Timothy Freeman (Utica, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" tells the story of lives lost in the dark. The citizens of Anderson's fictional Winesburg all harbor mysterious secrets and are internally conflicted. In a series of vignettes that do not follow a chronological timeframe, tragic lives full of lonliness, longing and regret are delineated in plain prose. One man, George Willard, stands out above the rest of these "grotesque" characters of Winesburg, and, in the last vignette titled "Depature", it says he goes out to, "meet the adventure of life."

Written around the time of World War I, Anderson paints a lonely picture of the American small town. At a time when the nation was rapidly becoming a large, homogenized community, "Winesburg, Ohio" answers the sentiments felt by individuals living in small towns not yet assimilated by the emerging mainstream culture. For the marginalized denizens of Winesburg, Anderson portrays the small town as anachronistic in its isolation. This isolation reveals itself individually in the stories of the lives of the characters as told in the vignettes.