Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life

Sherwood Anderson

Jun 2009 · The Floating Press

About this ebook

Winesburg, Ohio is a series of loosely linked short stories set in the fictional town of Winesburg. The stories are held together by George Willard, a resident to whom the community confide their personal stories and struggles. The townspeople are withdrawn and emotionally repressed and attempt in telling their stories to gain some sense of meaning and dignity in an otherwise desperate life. The work has received high critical acclaim and is considered one of the great American works of the 20th century.

About the author

Sherwood Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio, and grew up in nearby Clyde. In 1898 he joined the U.S. Army and served in the Spanish-American War. In 1900 he enrolled in the Wittenberg Academy. The following year he moved to Chicago where he began a successful business career in advertising. Despite his business success, in 1912 Anderson walked away to pursue writing full time. His first novel was Windy McPherson's Son, published in 1916, and his second was Marching Men, published in 1917. The phenomenally successful Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of short stories about fictionalized characters in a small midwestern town, followed in 1919. Anderson wrote novels including The Triumph of the Egg, Poor White, Many Marriages, and Dark Laughter, but it was his short stories that made him famous. Through his short stories he revolutionized short fiction and altered the direction of the modern short story. He is credited with influencing such writers as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Anderson died in March, 1941, of peritonitis suffered during a trip to South America. The epitaph he wrote for himself proclaims, "Life, not death, is the great adventure."