Winesburg, Ohio is a 1919
short story cycleA short story cycle is a collection of short stories in which the narratives are specifically composed and arranged with the goal of creating an enhanced or different experience when reading the group as a whole as opposed to its individual parts...
by the American author
Sherwood AndersonSherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz.-Early life:Anderson was born in Clyde, Ohio,...
. 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
WinesburgWinesburg is an unincorporated community in southwestern Paint Township, Holmes County, Ohio, United States. The town sits on the crest of a hill in the Amish country of Ohio, with a quaint downtown containing antique shops. It lies along U.S. Route 62....
), which is based loosely on the author's childhood memories of
Clyde, OhioClyde is a city in Sandusky County, Ohio, United States. The population was 6,064 at the 2000 census. The National Arbor Day Foundation has designated Clyde as a Tree City USA....
.
Mostly written from late 1915 to early 1916, with a few stories completed closer to publication, they were "...conceived as complementary parts of a whole, centered in the background of a single community." The book consists of twenty-two stories, with the first story, "The Book of the Grotesque", serving as an introduction. Each of the stories shares a specific character's past and present struggle to overcome the loneliness and isolation that seems to permeate the town. Stylistically, because of its emphasis on the psychological insights of characters over plot, and plain-spoken prose,
Winesburg, Ohio is known as one of the earliest Modern fictional works.
Winesburg, Ohio was received well by critics despite some reservations about its moral tone and unconventional storytelling. Though its reputation waned in the 1930s, it has since rebounded and is now considered one of the most influential portraits of
pre-industrialPre-industrial society refers to specific social attributes and forms of political and cultural organization that were prevalent before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It is followed by the industrial society....
small-town life in the United States.
In 1998, the
Modern LibraryThe Modern Library is a publishing company. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, it was purchased in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer...
ranked
Winesburg, Ohio 24th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Genre
Though there is practically no argument about the unity of structure within
Winesburg, Ohio, few scholars have concluded that it fits the standards of a conventional novel. Instead, it is typically placed "...midway between the novel proper and the mere collection of stories," known as the short story cycle. Aside from its structural unity, the common setting, characters, symbolism and "consistency of mood" are all additional qualities that tie the stories together despite their initial publication as separate tales.
Promoted to younger writers by Anderson himself,
Winesburg, Ohio has served as a representative early example of the modern short story cycle in American letters. Comparisons between
Winesburg, Ohio and
Jean ToomerJean Toomer was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book Cane is considered by many as his most significant.-Early life:...
's
CaneCane is a 1923 novel by noted Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer. The novel is structured as a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes alternate in structure between narrative prose, poetry, and play-like...
(1923),
Ernest HemingwayErnest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
's
In Our TimeIn Our Time is the first collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway published by Boni & Liveright in New York in 1925, after a smaller edition of the book, titled in our time, had been published in Paris in 1924...
(1925),
William FaulknerWilliam Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
's
Go Down Moses"Go Down Moses" is an American Negro spiritual. It describes events in the Old Testament of the Bible, specifically Exodus 7:16: "And the Lord spoke unto Moses, go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, thus saith the Lord, Let my people go, that they may serve me", in which God commands Moses to demand...
(1942), and several of
John SteinbeckJohn Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...
's works, among others, demonstrate the pervasiveness of the formal innovations made in Anderson's book.
The focus on George Willard's development as a young man and a writer has also led some critics to put
Winesburg, Ohio within the tradition of "the American boy book, the
BildungsromanIn literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
, and the
KünstlerromanA Künstlerroman , meaning "artist's novel" in German, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity. It may be classified as a specific sub-genre of Bildungsroman; such a work, usually a novel, tends to depict the conflicts of a sensitive youth against the values of a bourgeois society of his...
".
Setting
It is widely acknowledged that the fictional model of the book's town, Winesburg, is based on Sherwood Anderson's boyhood memories of
Clyde, OhioClyde is a city in Sandusky County, Ohio, United States. The population was 6,064 at the 2000 census. The National Arbor Day Foundation has designated Clyde as a Tree City USA....
, where Anderson lived between the ages of eight and nineteen (1884–1896), and not the actual town of Winesburg, Ohio located in the same state. This view is supported by the similarities between the names and qualities of several Winesburg characters and Clyde's townspeople, in addition to mentions of specific geographic details of Clyde and the surrounding area.
It is not known why Anderson chose the name
Winesburg for the town in the book. What is known is that the name was not necessarily inspired by the stories themselves. In actuality, Anderson had been using Winesburg, Ohio as a base for Talbot Whittingham, the protagonist of an unfinished novel he had been writing on-and-off for several years prior to the composition of the Winesburg stories.
A direct relationship between the real Clyde and the fictional Winesburg, however, remains the supposition of scholars. Anderson wrote in
A Writer's Conception of Realism that he reacted with "shock" when he "...heard people say that one of my own books
Winesburg, Ohio, was an exact picture of Ohio village life." The author went on to admit that, "the hint for almost every character was taken from my fellow lodgers in a large rooming house..." These lodgers were the "...young musicians, young writers, painters, actors..." and others that lived in proximity to Anderson on the North Side of Chicago and to whom he referred as "The Little Children of the Arts". The truth likely lies somewhere in between, with memories of Clyde "merging" with Anderson's interactions at the boardinghouse.
Literary sources
Because Sherwood Anderson was so ambiguous about what directly influenced him, it is difficult to say that any specific writer or work inspired him to write
Winesburg, Ohio as a whole. Still, most scholars affirm the obvious connection between Anderson's cycle and the
Spoon River AnthologySpoon River Anthology , by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate...
of
Edgar Lee MastersEdgar Lee Masters was an American poet, biographer, and dramatist...
(published in ), which Anderson reportedly stayed up all night to read. Though B.W. Huebsch, Anderson's publisher, sent out a statement, upon the release of
Winesburg, Ohio, heading off comparisons between the two works by stating (erroneously, as it turns out) that the Winesburg stories were printed in magazines before the
Spoon River Anthology was published, the similarities in small-town setting, structure, and mood of the works have been noted by several reviewers, with one going so far as to call
Winesburg, Ohio, the
Spoon River Anthology "...put into prose."
Gertrude SteinGertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, whose work Anderson was introduced to by either his brother Karl or photographer
Alfred StieglitzAlfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form...
between 1912 and 1915, is also said to have played a key role in helping shape the unique style found in the stories. Through his interaction (at first satirizing it before ultimately accepting it as essential to his development) with Stein's
Three LivesThree Lives was Gertrude Stein's first published work. The book is separated into three stories, "The Good Anna," "Melanctha," and "The Gentle Lena."...
(1909) and
Tender ButtonsTender Buttons: objects, food, rooms is the title of a 1914 book by Gertrude Stein consisting of word clusters chosen for their prosody, juxtaposed for the purpose of subverting commonplace dictionary meanings which Stein believed had largely lost their expressive force and ability to communicate...
(1914), Anderson found the plain, unambiguous voice that became a staple of his prose. As indicated by the correspondence the two writers developed after the publication of
Winesburg, Ohio, variations on the repetition found in Stein's writing in addition to their mutual appreciation for the sentence as a basic unit of prose were also likely features of her writing that Anderson noticed and drew upon in writing his
Winesburg, Ohio. Literary critic
Irving HoweIrving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.-Life and career:...
summarized the pair's connection aptly when he wrote, "Stein was the best kind of influence: she did not bend Anderson to her style, she liberated him for his own."
Numerous other writers and works have been mentioned as possible sources from which the elements of
Winesburg, Ohio were drawn, most of them either denied or unacknowledged by Anderson himself. The influence of
Theodore DreiserTheodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...
and the Russians (
ChekhovAnton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
, Dostoevsky, and
TolstoyLev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
) were discounted by the author, the former for stylistic reasons, the latter because he had apparently not read them prior to writing his book. While Anderson expressed an admiration for
Ivan TurgenevIvan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...
's
A Sportsman's SketchesA Sportsman's Sketches was an 1852 collection of short stories by Ivan Turgenev. It was the first major writing that gained him recognition...
, the affinities between Turgenev's novel and
Winesburg, Ohio ("...both are episodic novels containing loosely bound but closely related sketches, both depend for impact less on dramatic action than on climactic lyrical insight, and in both the individual sketches frequently end with bland understatements that form an ironic coda to the body of the writing" ) may not be a sign of influence since it is not known whether Anderson read the book before writing
Winesburg, Ohio. Finally, the regional focus on the
MidwestThe Midwestern United States is one of the four U.S. geographic regions defined by the United States Census Bureau, providing an official definition of the American Midwest....
has been linked to the writing of
Mark TwainSamuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
, particularly
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and while Anderson read and revered Twain, the connection between Twain and
Winesburg, Ohio has largely been made by scholars seeking to place the book within the canon of American literature, not necessarily by the author.
Composition and publication
According to Anderson's account, the first of the stories that became
Winesburg, Ohio (probably "The Book of the Grotesque") was composed, on the spur of the moment, in the middle of the night, probably while he was staying on the third floor of a rooming house at in Chicago: "...it was a late fall night and raining...I was there naked in the bed and I sprang up. I went to my typewriter and began to write. It was there, under those circumstances, myself sitting near an open window, the rain occasionally blowing in and wetting my bare back, that I did my first writing...I wrote it, as I wrote them all, complete in the one sitting...The rest of the stories in the book came out of me on succeeding evenings, and sometimes during the day while I worked in the advertising office..." Study of his manuscripts show that, though it is probably true that most of the stories were written within a relatively short span of time in late 1915, like a number of facts in Anderson's retelling of his writing process (for instance, his claim that he had written the
Winesburg, Ohio stories after his earlier books were already published), it is inaccurate to say that the final versions of the stories published in 1919 were exactly the same as the ones written whole four years earlier.
In fact, in his seminal article "How Sherwood Anderson wrote
Winesburg, Ohio," William L. Phillips wrote that the manuscript of "Hands" contained "...almost two hundred instances in which earlier words and phrases are deleted, changed, or added to..." though no major structural changes to the story were detected. Additionally, slightly different versions of ten stories that ended up in the book were published by three literary magazines between 1916–1918 as follows:
| Story Title | Magazine Name | Publication Date |
| "The Book of the Grotesque" |
Masses |
February 1916 |
| "Hands" |
Masses |
March 1916 |
| "Paper Pills" (as "The Philosopher") |
Little Review The Little Review, an American literary magazine founded by Margaret Anderson, published literary and art work from 1914 to 1929. With the help of Jane Heap and Ezra Pound, Anderson created a magazine that featured a wide variety of transatlantic modernists and cultivated many early examples of...
|
June–July 1916 |
| "The Strength of God" |
Masses |
August 1916 |
| "Queer" |
Seven Arts The Seven Arts was a literary journal which flourished briefly in 1916-1917. It was edited by James Oppenheim, Waldo Frank, and Van Wyck Brooks. The magazine featured new American writing by figures such as Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill, and John Dos Passos...
|
December 1916 |
| "The Untold Lie" |
Seven Arts The Seven Arts was a literary journal which flourished briefly in 1916-1917. It was edited by James Oppenheim, Waldo Frank, and Van Wyck Brooks. The magazine featured new American writing by figures such as Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill, and John Dos Passos...
|
January 1917 |
| "Mother" |
Seven Arts The Seven Arts was a literary journal which flourished briefly in 1916-1917. It was edited by James Oppenheim, Waldo Frank, and Van Wyck Brooks. The magazine featured new American writing by figures such as Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill, and John Dos Passos...
|
March 1917 |
| "The Thinker" |
Seven Arts The Seven Arts was a literary journal which flourished briefly in 1916-1917. It was edited by James Oppenheim, Waldo Frank, and Van Wyck Brooks. The magazine featured new American writing by figures such as Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill, and John Dos Passos...
|
September 1917 |
| "The Man of Ideas" |
Little Review The Little Review, an American literary magazine founded by Margaret Anderson, published literary and art work from 1914 to 1929. With the help of Jane Heap and Ezra Pound, Anderson created a magazine that featured a wide variety of transatlantic modernists and cultivated many early examples of...
|
June 1918 |
| "An Awakening" |
Little Review The Little Review, an American literary magazine founded by Margaret Anderson, published literary and art work from 1914 to 1929. With the help of Jane Heap and Ezra Pound, Anderson created a magazine that featured a wide variety of transatlantic modernists and cultivated many early examples of...
|
December 1918 |
Though the stories were published to some acclaim in literary circles,
John Lane-Biography:Originally from Devon, where he was born into a farming family, Lane moved to London already in his teens. While working as a clerk at the Railway Clearing House, he acquired knowledge as an autodidact....
, the publisher of Anderson's first two novels, referred to the
Winesburg, Ohio stories as "too gloomy" and refused to publish them. It was not until editor
Francis HackettFrancis Hackett was born in Kilkenny, Ireland in 1883 to the daughter of a farmer and a medical officer. He is most famous for writing a detailed book about Henry VIII but was also a noted critic and published several other books most of which were either non-fiction or biographies.He was educated...
, showed the manuscript to Ben Huebsch, owner and editor of a small publishing house in
New YorkNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, that the stories (Huebsch suggested calling them "Winesburg, Ohio") were brought together and published.
The stories
The cycle consists of twenty-two short stories, one of which consists of four parts:
[The formatting of the story titles, particularly the italics, em-dashes, and the quotations around "Queer" are consistent with the style of the book's numerous editions. For two examples see Winesburg, Ohio (Modern Library/Random House, 1947) and Anderson (W.W. Norton, 1996).]
- 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 Willard
The 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 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 CowleyMalcolm Cowley was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.-Early life:...
writes in his introduction to the 1960
VikingViking Press is an American publishing company owned by the Penguin Group, which has owned the company since 1975. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim...
edition of
Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson's "...instinct was to present everything together, as in a dream".
Major themes
The major themes of
Winesburg, Ohio largely concern the interaction between the individual citizens of Winesburg and the world around them. As each of the book's stories focuses primarily (though not exclusively) on one character, the narrator develops these themes continuously, sometimes adding new insights about previously introduced characters (Elizabeth Willard's relationship with Dr. Reefy in "Death", for example, was never alluded to when she was first introduced in "Mother".). Because George Willard is a fixture in much of the book, his character arc becomes just as important a theme of
Winesburg, Ohio as that of the rest of town's inhabitants.
Inability to communicate, loneliness, and isolation
The most prevalent theme in
Winesburg, Ohio is the interplay between how the Winesburg citizens' "...inability to translate inner feelings into outward form" expresses itself in the loneliness and isolation that makes their various adventures noteworthy. This dynamic is present, in some form, in practically all of the stories, two fairly representative examples being the merchant's son, Elmer Cowley, in the story "Queer", and George's mother, Elizabeth Willard, in the stories, "Mother" and "Death".
In the former, the young man, Elmer Cowley, incited by an imagined slight ("He thought that the boy who passed and repassed Cowley & Son's store ...must be thinking of him and perhaps laughing at him" when in reality, "[George] had long been wanting to make friends with the young merchant...") tries twice to tell George off but is unable to communicate his feelings either time, finally physically assaulting the young reporter. The story ends with Cowley telling himself, " 'I showed him...I guess I showed him. I guess I showed him I ain't so queer", a proclamation obviously laced with dramatic irony.
In the latter two stories, Elizabeth Willard was the "tall and gaunt...ghostly figure [moving] slowly through the halls..." of the New Willard House who eventually, in "Death", succumbs to illness. In her youth, Elizabeth "...had been 'stage-struck' and, wearing loud clothes, paraded the streets with traveling men from her father's hotel". She was a character who, "perhaps more than any of the other characters, seeks some kind of release from her perpetual loneliness". And yet, aside from her very brief love affair with Dr. Reefy, Elizabeth Willard finds no solace. Instead, both of her stories conclude with Elizabeth Willard attempting to communicate with her son but, like the dumbfounded Elmer Cowley, winding up unsuccessful.
Escaping isolation
In contrast with the stark view of
Winesburg, Ohio above, a number of scholars have taken the perspective that the cycle is, in fact, about escape from isolation instead of the condition itself. Barry D. Bort writes, "Criticism of
Winesburg, Ohio has recognized this desperate need to communicate, but what has not been understood about Anderson's work is that this continual frustration serves as the context out of which arise a few luminous moments of understanding...Such moments are at the heart of
Winesburg, Ohio, although they are few and evanescent". Though rarely does escape come in the narrative present, many of the stories prominently feature anecdotes of past adventures where lonely and reserved characters run naked through the town on a rainy night (Alice Hindman in "Adventure"), drive their wagon headlong into a speeding locomotive (Windpeter Winters in "The Untold Lie"), and have window-shattering religious epiphanies (Reverend Curtis Hartman in "The Strength of God"). While not all of the adventures are so dramatic, each has its place in the annals of the town, sometimes as told to George Willard, other times in the memories of participants.
George Willard's coming-of-age
George Willard, a young reporter for the
Winesburg Eagle, figures prominently in much of
Winesburg, Ohio.
[As noted in Ingram (1971: 151), George appears in all but six of the stories.] Throughout the book, he plays the dual role of listener and recorder of other people's stories and advice, and the young representative of the town's hopes whose coming-of-age reaches its dénouement in the final tale, "Departure", when George leaves Winesburg for the city. Much of George's development is centered around two interconnected threads: those of his sexual and artistic maturation. Most of the time, these two formative elements proceed together; it is solely when George loses his virginity to Louise Trunnion in "Nobody Knows" that the adventure is exclusively sexual. Afterwards, starting with his desire to fall in love with Helen White in order to have material for a love story in "The Thinker", the desire for sexual fulfillment becomes linked to his literary/emotional sensibility.
In "The Teacher", a central point in George's development, "Kate Swift, George's school teacher, realizes his literary potential..." and tries to communicate her thoughts to George but, "...his sexual desire kindles her own, and she loses touch with the intellectual, spiritual, and creative potentials of her emotion. At last, however, George begins to perceive that there is something more to be communicated between men and women than physical encounter..." Yet this lesson is not solidified for the young reporter when, after boasting in a bar in the story "An Awakening", he has a surge of "masculine power" and tries to seduce Belle Carpenter, only to be repelled and humiliated by her beau, the large-fisted bartender, Ed Handby.
The climax of George's sexual and artistic coming-of-age comes in the second-to-last story of the collection, "Sophistication". Early in the story, while walking amongst the crowds of the Winesburg County Fair, George felt "...a thing known to men and unknown to boys. He felt old and little tired...[and]...he wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother's death [an event that took place in, "Death", the previous story]". That someone turned out to be Helen White, who herself had "...come to a period of change". It is in the time they spend together that readers see "his acceptance of Helen as a spiritual mediator..." which signifies that "...George's masculinity is balanced by the feminine qualities of tenderness and gentleness, an integration that Anderson suggests is necessary for the artist."
Style
The style of
Winesburg, Ohio has often been placed at various points in the spectrum between the
naturalismNaturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
of Anderson’s literary predecessor,
William Dean HowellsWilliam Dean Howells was an American realist author and literary critic. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novel The Rise of...
(who died almost one year after the publication of the book), contemporaries Theodore Dreiser and
Sinclair LewisHarry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...
, and the
ModernistModernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
writers of the
Lost GenerationThe "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...
. In what has been dubbed a "New Realism",
Winesburg, Ohio surpasses the notion of the novel as an "objective report" by making use of "lyrical, nostalgic, evocative," even sentimental effects of nineteenth-century novels in its depictions of what lies beneath the psychological surface of a midwestern town. In the book, Anderson reoriented the facts typical of
realistLiterary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
novels by incorporating his characters' inner beliefs about themselves as part of "reality".
The symbolism in
Winesburg, Ohio plays a large role in allowing for this reorientation. Beginning with the idea of characters as grotesques whose "...grotesqueness is not merely a shield of deformity; it is also a remnant of misshapen feelings, what Dr. Reefy in the sketch 'Paper Pills' calls 'the sweetness of the twisted apples'". The irony of the sweet, but twisted (meaning, in the
sentimentalThe sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility...
VictorianThe Victorian Era is a name for the period from 1837 to 1901, the length of the rule of Britain's Queen Victoria. American Victorianism was an offshoot of this period and lifestyle that occurred in the United States, chiefly in heavily populated regions such as New England and the Deep South...
tradition, internally inferior), apples is that they are compared to Dr. Reefy's own knuckles that make a habit of stuffing crumpled notes bearing his thoughts unread into his pockets (itself a symbol of the "ineffectuality of human thought"). Wing Biddlebaum, the subject of the story "Hands", likewise was "...forever striving to conceal [his hands] in his pockets or behind his back". For Wing, his hands were "...the very index of his humanity", with the potential to symbolize a continuum going from a general fear of sexuality to sublimated homosexuality. Wing Biddlebaum and Dr. Reefy are just two examples of how throughout
Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson builds myriad themes by adding symbolic significance to gestures, weather conditions and time of day, and events, among other features of the stories.
Another major characteristic of
Winesburg, Ohio that separates its style from Anderson's contemporaries, as well as his previous novels, is the minimal role of plot. According to critic David Stouk's article "Anderson's Expressionist Art", "As an expressionist drama, there is little development of a story line in the Winesburg tales in term of cause and effect." Indeed, it is this de-emphasis of traditional story elements in lieu of experimentation with language that provides both a link and a rift between
Winesburg, Ohio and the novels of the following decades; whereas the simple, stripped-down vernacular that Gertrude Stein found so appealing in Anderson's writing of the time became an exemplar of quintessential American style most famously associated with Ernest Hemingway, the expressionistic portrayal of emotional states in
Winesburg, Ohio was later, by some critics, considered "undisciplined" and "vague".
Literary significance and criticism
The critical reception to
Winesburg, Ohio upon its publication in 1919 was mostly positive, even effusive.
Hart Crane-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...
, for example, wrote that "...America should read this book on her knees," while H.L. Mencken wrote that
Winesburg, Ohio "...embodies some of the most remarkable writing done in America in our time". Despite criticism that Anderson’s "sordid tales" were humorless, and "mired...in plotlessness",
Winesburg, Ohio did well enough that it was reprinted several times, selling a total of about by 1921.
[Phillips (1976: 153-154) discusses the early print runs and sales figures noting "Since sales and other records of the B.W. Huebsch publishing house have long since been destroyed, it is not possible to be certain about the quantity of each printing, but an estimate can be made from other evidence".]
The popularity of
Winesburg, Ohio among readers and critics has remained fairly high, only fluctuating slightly with Sherwood Anderson’s literary reputation which, while steady through the 1920s, began to decline in the 1930s, until William L. Phillips, following the lukewarm reception of
The Letters of Sherwood Anderson in 1953, commented that "...Anderson is out of fashion." Throughout that decade, however, the author and his most popular book were the subject of a "...re-examination, if only as a neglected literary ancestor of the moderns." Into the 1960s and beyond, this "re-examination" became a "reevaluation" by critics who today generally consider
Winesburg, Ohio a modern classic.
Literary and cultural connections
Ray BradburyRay Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...
has credited
Winesburg, Ohio as an inspiration for his book
The Martian ChroniclesThe Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction short story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists...
.
H. P. LovecraftHoward Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
said that he wrote the short story "
Arthur Jermyn"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written in 1920. The story was first published in the journal The Wolverine in March and June of 1921...
" after he "had nearly fallen asleep over the tame backstairs gossip of Anderson's
Winesburg, Ohio."
Israeli writer
Amos OzAmos Oz is an Israeli writer, novelist, and journalist. He is also a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva....
writes in his biography
A Tale of Love and DarknessA Tale of Love and Darkness is an autobiographical novel by Israeli author Amos Oz, first published in Hebrew in 2002.The book has been translated into 28 languages and over a million copies have been sold worldwide. In 2011, a bootleg Kurdish translation was found in a bookstore in northern Iraq...
that
Winesburg, Ohio had a powerful influence on his writing, showing him that literature must not necessarily always be about heroes. Only after reading Anderson did he find the courage to start writing.
Philip RothPhilip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...
's 2008 novel
IndignationIndignation is a novel by Philip Roth, released by Houghton Mifflin on September 16, 2008. It is his twenty-ninth book.-Plot:Set in America in 1951, the second year of the Korean War, Indignation is narrated by Marcus Messner, a college student from Newark, New Jersey, who describes his sophomore...
is set, in part, at Winesburg College in Winesburg, Ohio. His protagonist holds a part-time job as a waiter at the "New Willard House", evoking the protagonist, George Willard, of Anderson's book.
Henry MillerHenry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
references the book on the first page of his novel
Sexus (of
The Rosy CrucifixionThe Rosy Crucifixion, consisting of Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus, documents the period of Henry Miller's life from his first divorce in 1928 to his departure for France in 1930.-Sexus:...
series).
In the 1985 film,
Heaven Help UsHeaven Help Us is a 1985 comedy-drama film starring Andrew McCarthy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kevin Dillon, Donald Sutherland, Wallace Shawn, Stephen Geoffreys, John Heard, and Patrick Dempsey.-Story:...
, Danni reads a passage from "Sophistication" to her grief-stricken father.
In the ABC television series,
Pretty Little LiarsPretty Little Liars is a series of more than 10 young adult novels by Sara Shepard, from 1981–present, which have been made into a television show . The series follows the lives of four girls — Spencer, Hanna, Aria, and Emily — whose clique falls apart after the disappearance of their leader,...
, the book is given to the character
Aria MontgomeryAria Marie Montgomery is a fictional character in the Pretty Little Liars series of young adult novels by Sara Shepard. She is portrayed by Lucy Hale in the television adaptation, which premiered on ABC Family in June 2010...
by her English teacher, Ezra Fitz, with whom she is having an affair. He writes the inscription "When you need to leave Rosewood... Ezra" on the first page.
Film
A TV version was made in 1973 directed by
Ralph SenenskyRalph Senensky is an American television director and writer. He studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and worked as a stage director before directing for television....
and starring
JosephJoseph Bottoms is an American actor who won the 1975 Golden Globe Award for New Star Of The Year - Actor for his role in The Dove...
and
Timothy Bottoms-Early life:Bottoms was born in Santa Barbara, California, the eldest son of Betty and James "Bud" Bottoms, who is a sculptor and art teacher. He is the brother of actors Joseph Bottoms , Sam Bottoms and Ben Bottoms . In 1967, Bottoms toured Europe as part of the Santa Barbara Madrigal...
as George Willard,
Jean PetersJean Peters was an American actress, known as a star of 20th Century Fox in the late 1940s and early 1950s and as the second wife of Howard Hughes...
as Elizabeth Willard,
Curt ConwayCurt Conway was an American actor. He was sometimes billed as Curtis Conway or Kurt Conway.Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Conway began his career with small parts in films of the late 1940s, but appeared principally on TV from 1960 until his death...
as Will Henderson,
Norman FosterNorman Foster was an American film director and actor.Born John Hoeffer in Richmond, Indiana, Foster originally became a cub reporter on a local newspaper in Indiana before going to New York in the hopes of getting a better newspaper job but there were no vacancies...
as Old Pete,
Dabbs GreerRobert William "Dabbs" Greer was an American actor who performed many diverse supporting roles in film and television for some fifty years. His distinctive, southern-accented voice fitted well in shows featuring rustic characters, such as westerns...
as Parcival,
Albert SalmiAlbert Salmi was an American actor.-Biography:Albert Salmi was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Finnish immigrant parents, and following a stint in the Army, took up acting as a career, studying Method acting with Lee Strasberg. In 1955, Salmi starred in Bus Stop on Broadway...
as Tom Willard, Laurette Spang as Helen White, and
William WindomWilliam Windom is an American actor. He is perhaps best known for his work on television, including several episodes of The Twilight Zone; playing the character of Glen Morley, a congressman from Minnesota like his own great-grandfather and namesake in The Farmer's Daughter; the character of John...
as Dr. Reefy.
Stage
A stage adaptation of
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (initially in collaboration with playwright Arthur Barton) was performed at the
Hedgerow TheatreHedgerow Theatre is a theatre company based in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. It is the oldest residential repertory theatre company in the United States....
in
Rose Valley, PennsylvaniaRose Valley is a small but historic borough in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States. Its area is and the population was 944 at the 2000 census. It was settled by Quaker farmers in 1682, and later water mills along Ridley Creek drove manufacturing in the nineteenth century...
in 1934. Directed by Jasper Deeter, it achieved some success, running from June through September of that year.
Charles Scribner's SonsCharles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing a number of American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Clellon...
published this version of the play alongside three one-act plays (
Triumph of an Egg,
Mother, and
They Married Later), also by Anderson, as
Plays: Winesburg and Others in 1937.
A Broadway production played for in at the
Nederlander TheatreDavid T. Nederlander Theatre is a 1,232-seat Broadway theatre located at 208 West 41st Street, in New York City . One of the Nederlander Organization's nine Broadway theatres, the legacy of the theatre began with David Tobias Nederlander, for whom the theatre is named.Built by Walter C...
(then known as the National Theatre). The adaptation, written by Christopher Sergel, starred Ben Piazza as George Willard,
James WhitmoreJames Allen Whitmore, Jr. was an American film and stage actor.-Early life:Born in White Plains, New York, to Florence Belle and James Allen Whitmore, Sr., a park commission official, Whitmore attended Amherst Central High School in Snyder, New York, before graduating from The Choate School in...
as Tom Willard,
Sandra ChurchSandra Church is an American actress in films and theatre, primarily known for her performance as Gypsy Rose Lee in the 1959 musical Gypsy: A Musical Fable, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.- Early life :Church was born and raised in San...
as Helen White, and
Leon AmesLeon Ames was an American film and television actor. He is best remembered for playing fatherly figures in such films as Meet Me in St. Louis , as Judy Garland's father, and in Little Women ....
as Dr. Reefy.
Four of the stories from
Winesburg, Ohio were staged in 2001 at the Julia Morgan Theater in
Berkeley, CaliforniaBerkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
. Word for Word Performing Arts Company and the Shotgun Players adapted "A Man of Ideas", "Paper Pills", "Surrender", and "Hands". The production was nominated for five San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards (Entire Production – Drama, Supporting Performance – Female, Director, Sound Design, and Ensemble Performance).
The whole cycle was adapted into a musical and premiered in 2002 at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. The book and lyrics were written by Eric Rosen (in collaboration with Andrew Pluess, Ben Sussman, and Jessica Thebus). Following its 2002 premiere, the musical was featured as part of the About Face Theatre Company's 2003–2004 season. The About Face production received the two Jeff Awards for New Adaptation and Actor in a Supporting Role-Musical. A 2006 production of the musical by the
Arden Theatre Company (Philadelphia)-Introduction:The Arden Theatre Company is a full-service professional regional theatre located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, offering the highest quality theatrical and educational productions and programs to artists, audiences and students of the greater Philadelphia region. The company includes...
won the Barrymore Award for "Outstanding Musical".
A loose musical adaptation of
Winesburg, Ohio written by Kevin Kuhlke with music by Heaven Phillips premiered in 2003 as
Winesburg: Small Town Life at the
Perseverance TheatrePerseverance Theatre is a professional theater company located on Douglas Island in Juneau, Alaska. It is Alaska's only professional theater and is particularly dedicated to developing and working with Alaskan artists and to producing plays celebrating Alaskan culture, history, and...
in
Juneau, AlaskaThe City and Borough of Juneau is a unified municipality located on the Gastineau Channel in the panhandle of the U.S. state of Alaska. It has been the capital of Alaska since 1906, when the government of the then-District of Alaska was moved from Sitka as dictated by the U.S. Congress in 1900...
.
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External links