Customer Reviews

Winesburg, Ohio

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Sherwood Anderson published this collection of short stories in 1919 all set in fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio. Even though it's written in the third person, it's told through the narrative voice of George Willard, the town reporter, who shows up in most of the stories, sometimes taking an active role and at other times just telling a story.

It is obvious that the writer loves these people, and is frustrated at the isolation and unhappiness of their lives, even though he makes it clear that they hold within themselves everything needed to make them happy. The character in the first story is a dying old writer who is attempting to write about all the people he has known as a "book of grotesques". What follows is the collection of stories, which each character fulfilling that expectation.

There are the young lovers who don't quite connect; there is a old man so obsessed with religious fervor that he attempts to sacrifice his grandson; there is a married man who regrets it all and tries to warn a younger man of future unhappiness; there's a doctor and a sick woman who try to connect. The book is full of people who toil all their lives and never achieve happiness. As I made my way through the book I kept hoping that even one of the characters would rise above the morass. It didn't happen.

The writer has a wonderful sense of place and the town of Winesburg in the early part of the 20th Century is very real. These people were not poor or disadvantaged in the usual sense of the word; they didn't suffer fire, floods or famine. Instead, they trapped themselves in their own psychological webs that made it impossible for them to lead anything but sad unfulfilled lives. This is a fine book and stands alone as a clear voice of its time.

In the context of today's tell-all society, the kinds of human revelations and insights that Sherwood Anderson wove into the Winesburg stories may seem tame and even pedestrian. But at the time, few good writers were even attempting to penetrate into the "real life" experience of ordinary Americans. His efforts so many years ago are all the more valuable today, however, since it provides us a glimpse of what life was *really* like for some people in much-romanticized "small town America."

This novel is really a collection of loosely interrelated short stories, or perhaps even a series of character sketches, but so what? The value here is in the individual images and insights that Anderson provides, not in any emergent "plot."

The glimpses into the inner lives of ordinary Americans and the fine descriptions of place, mood, and events that Anderson provides in this work still speak to some readers, at least, today. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" is a string of twenty-one connected stories (plus an introduction) that, like James Joyce's "Dubliners", links a community of people to a single place and time and explores common themes. Most of the stories are told from the vista of the recurring central character George Willard, the local newspaper reporter and a sort of alter ego of Anderson, who used his own rural hometown of Clyde, Ohio, as a model for Winesburg.

Rather than an idyllic portrayal of American small town life in the 1890's, these stories are about psychological isolation, loneliness, and sexual repression and frustration brought about by small town mores. These people are as sad and neurotic as any that might be found living in the big cities. Anderson calls them "grotesques," people who are warped by the sanctimoniousness of provincial piety and their own inhibitions. His nonchalant, ironic way of writing understates the peculiarity and the gloominess of the stories.

The stories are loaded with symbolism that is difficult to decipher. My favorite is probably the four-part "Godliness", which, in a satire of religious fervor, merges parodies of the biblical tales of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac and David's slaying of Goliath. But all the stories have interesting allusions of various degrees of subtlety. This work must have seemed quite groundbreaking in its depth, complexity, and boldness when it was first published in 1919.

There was one particular scene (Chapter entitled 'Drink') toward the end of the novel that for me truly exemplifies one of the main points of this American masterpiece. In this poignant scene, a poor old woman and her orphaned, young grandson Tom are riding along in a train headed toward Winesburg. They were leaving Cincinnati in hopes to build a new life. The old woman grew up in Winesburg and was so gung ho about going back to her old town that as the train pressed on, she began to tell Tom how 'he would enjoy his life working in the fields and shooting wild things in the woods there.' She was delighted and excited about living in a small, close-knit community again. However, when the train finally arrived in Winesburg her excitement and delight turned to confusion, disappointment, and fear. For now, the once tiny village had now grown (in the past fifty years) into a large, flourishing town. She was so shocked upon her arrival that she didn't even want to get off of the train. She then turned to her grandson and said, "It isn't what I thought. It may be hard for you here."

I remember when I read this passage above, for my heart began to ache. I knew exactly what she was thinking and I could feel her pain!

This novel is essentially made up of a group of short stories about the townsfolk of Winesburg, Ohio in the early 1900's. However, it could be any town anywhere in America and it could take place at anytime, including today. All of the citizens, although completely unique and different from one another, each share one thing in common - they are all lost and searching for something that will bring meaning into their lonely lives. However, no matter what the "Saturday Evening Post" might tell you, life in small-town America isn't all that grand - especially if you are a man like our main protagonist George Willard. A man, like many of the other characters he comes in contact with in the novel, who secretly yearns to escape the narrow-mindedness of the mediocrity which reigns supreme in small-town, USA. However, the real conundrum is this - while George and the others are looking for a way out of the madness, they are also all searching and hankering for a sense of community and belonging. They wish to connect, they can't connect, they then become lonely and disillusioned and stir crazy. Eventually, like so many other people in their same situation, they feel trapped. Dean Koontz may sum it up best when he perceptively points out in his 'Afterword' of the novel, "these characters are repressed by their culture but equally by their inability to deal with their ambivalence, an indecisiveness that reduces them to bundles of potential energy without hope of expression."

I can't recommend this one enough. It's too bad Anderson's classic will pretty much go down in history as a one-hit wonder (although he has written many excellent short stories). I really, really loved his style of writing and apparently he influenced such American literary legends as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck to name a few. To me, I think it is Steinbeck who most resembles Anderson's style. They both are really able to capture the true essence of the common man: "The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say. p. 161" I used to believe that Steinbeck was the greatest writer when it came to really understanding the true embodiment of the common, American man. It's the reason I love him so. He was able to dig the deepest into our hearts, minds, and souls and see the parts of us that even we fail to see 97% of the time. That being said, Anderson, in "Winesburg, Ohio", is able to dig even deeper believe it or not. I think one of the secrets to this is because both of these men were more than just writers. They both held a variety of different jobs and surrounded themselves with the 'common man' much more so than that of other great writers who spent their life hanging out with like-kind fellows and never had all that real world experience. In many ways, they were the common man! However, that's just one simple man's simple opinion.

When all said and done, this classic novel will have you thinking about it for a long time after you've finished reading it. I had one hec of a time trying to put it down. It's a quick read, but it's a read that will stay with me for a long, long time. I will never forget it and wouldn't hesitate recommending it to all of you bibliophiles out there. Easily, easily, easily a five-star pearl!

three, four, five times. maybe more. "winesburg, ohio" is a transcendent reading experience. the equivalent, perhaps, of peering through a magnificent kaleidoscope and watching the colors and patterns turn one way, then the other. by turns funny, sad, but mostly tragic, anderson takes us on a guided tour of a small mid-western town. each vignette, weighing in at merely ten pages apiece, is a jewel of understatement. the language, simple and poetic, is a dream. beyond a dream. and it packs a heartache as real as anything you'll find in a book 5 times its size. the real marvel, however, is when you flip to the beginning and start all over again.

Let's just start with the fact that Faulkner, Hemingway, and Wolfe worshiped at this man's feet and that this book is the reason why. There are many reviewers here that just can't figure out what the author is trying to get across. How is that possible? He states it flat out in just about every story, but in the Book of the Grotesque, he's abundantly clear. We each seize upon an obsession that deforms us to the point that we are incommunicable to each other. Anderson then goes on to observe case studies of that dynamic in action.

This book is completely underrated for its impact. If you wonder why you begin to enjoy short stories right around 1920, this is the reason. Anderson created the purely psychological revelatory ending. It took Raymond Carver to knock that out of vogue, but it was vulnerable primarily because it had been done so many times. I will stand fully behind the arguement that the only short story worth your time before this is Joyce's The Dead, and that's because it has an Andersonesque ending. If anyone can provide another example, I'm dying to know.

Anderson created the modern short story with this book. He lost credibility later because he wasn't able to follow this stunning first act. However, he inspired and mentored America's next generation of authors, and his relegation to the literary dung heap is absurd. Granted that he took almost his entire mood and subject matter from Spoon River Anthology, but he certainly delivered a masterpiece in short order.

All of Anderson's short stories are worthwhile, and I wish that you could easily find his later collections in print. Triumph of the Egg, Horses and Men, and Death in the Woods are each spectacular collections, but don't have the cohesion of Winesburg. Individually, however, there are stronger stories in the other collections, so seek them out if you like Winesburg. Anderson finds the mythic in the commonplace and presents it in the language of the common man of the time. It's inspiring, and nobel prize winning careers have been made in the attempt to pull off the same effect. Only Faulkner can claim to have succeeded.

I read this book in my college American Literature class on my way to an English minor. Its still one of my favorite books of all time. In these times where fragmented identities or a disconnect between the surface and the actual is prevalent in our daily lives, I believe literature such as this contains more and more meaning. Please read it.

My father gave me this book when I was thirteen or fourteen and said it was one of his favorites, maybe his very favorite fictional piece. I read it then and actually liked it, although I realize now that probably half of it went over my head. I read it now and am blown away by the emotion it brings out in me. This book is, as many people have insisted, a set of character sketches, loosely intertwined and collected by George Willard, the young reporter of Winesburg. Each story, taken on its own, is a powerful piece of descriptive writing. Perhaps (as some have said) the book is outdated, a period piece. Perhaps it's a bit sentimental, a bit flippant. But the fact remains that, whether or not these stories show the inner workings of the human soul, they are fiction at its best: beautifully written, they make you think, and they evoke true emotion because the characters and their struggles are so real. Read these stories to see good fiction at work.

This edition of "Winesburg, Ohio" was edited in a very bizzare manner. It seemed as though the text from another edition was brought over and simply pasted to this edition, which caused words to be hyphenated in the middle of paragraphs. In other words, what seemed to happen was where a word that might have been at the end of a line in one previous edition was now positioned in the middle of a line, but it was still hyphenated as it had been. This was very distracting and after the second page I had to stop reading, because the hyphen-ation was break-ing words that should not have been bro-ken and, in effect, alter-ing the em-phasis and meaning of the text. Very shoddy editing.

A book of stories that give glimpses into the secret lives of men and women in small town Ohio. The characters in this book could be characters anyplace in the world though. Each has a story, each has secrets, each has passions, disappointments, desires, longing. I personally think that each of the characters in Winesburg are reaching out for connection to other people. They long to have even a moment of understanding, sympathy, companionship in the midst of a life that is big and unclear, a universe that expands above them nightly to remind them of their infinite smallness. This book is as meaningful today as it was when it was written--maybe even more so. As our world becomes more and more faceless with telephones and emails and air-conditioning, wouldn't it be nice to connect to a person instead of a remote computer? Wouldn't it be nice to know that there are others with thwarted desires, stinging disappointments, undying hope, just like us? Take a read through Winesburg and meet some of them.