Links for Winesburg, Ohio Stories

Along with the story found in OBASS, please also read "Hands". 

If you find that you love Sherwood Anderson, and YOU SHOULD, you can also read my favorite story from Winesburg, "Paper Pills".

Sherwood Anderson was born in a small town in Ohio in 1876.  He moved close to Cleveland and lived there until in his late thirties.  According to sources, he had a "nervous breakdown" in 1912, which resulted in a move to Chicago and a career change from merchant to writer (well, he also had a day job in advertising).

He published Winesburg, Ohio in 1919 to great critical success, but it was the only one of his books (he wrote a few other novels and books of short stories) that enjoyed that kind of success, even though he kept writing almost until his death in 1941.  He was married four times.

Winesburg, Ohio is a book of short stories, connected to one another through the character George Williard.  Willard is a young reporter in whom the various members of the community confide their secrets and life stories.  Anderson calls these stories "grotesques."  Each of the characters has become somehow psychologically misshapen and disproportional.  Anderson explains in his introduction (entitled "The Book of the Grotesque") to the book this way:

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth.  Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.  All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book.  I will not try to tell you all of them.  There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon.  Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along.  Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them. 

It was the truths that made the people grotesques.  The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter.  It was his notion that the moment one of these people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood. 

There is some question about whether the adherence to singular truths is what distorts each of the characters in Winesburg, or if there is some other reason that they have become lonely and odd.  Consider Anderson's explanation--and consider whether you may have an explanation yourself.  We'll discuss on Thursday.