Customer Reviews

Winesburg, Ohio (Worlds Classics)

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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.