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Winesburg, Ohio | Introduction

Winesburg, Ohio was Sherwood Anderson's breakthrough work, the one that first gained widespread attention for him as an artist, although it was years before he would produce a best seller. He was forty-two when it was published, with two novels published previously that had received little interest from the reading public.

According to the story that Anderson would later relate in his Memoirs, the book started one night when he was living by himself in a run-down rooming house in Chicago, in 1915: it was a place full of would-be artists, and Anderson, who was supporting himself by writing advertising copy, sat down one December evening and, almost miraculously, produced the story "Hands" in one sitting. In the version he often told, the story came out exactly as he wanted it and he never changed a word, although researchers have since turned up drafts that show substantial differences.

Having found his style in this one inspired flash, he went on to develop the other stories that make up Winesburg, Ohio over the next few years. When the book was published in 1919, it did not sell very well, but the critical response marked the author as a man of talent and artistic integrity. Some critics lambasted it for being immoral because of its sexual themes, both hidden and blatant, such as the child molestation charge in "Hands" or the implied impotency in "Respectability."

For each critic put off by the buried subjects, though, there were two or three who appreciated Anderson's courage in examining areas previously untouched by mainstream writers. Anderson's greatest influence on American literature has been indirect, in the ways that Winesburg, Ohio inspired the following generation of post-World War 1 writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and John Steinbeck. It was when these writers began speaking of the debt they owed to Sherwood Anderson that the book stopped being just a favorite of writers and gathered mass attention from the public.

Winesburg, Ohio Summary

Rather a single, well-defined plot, Winesburg. Ohio has a loosely interconnected set of stories with overlapping time frame and characters. Only when the town itself is considered the "main character" can one speak of an overall plot. In this macro-plot, the traditional small town life of nineteenth-century America comes to an end; its hard but stable community is broken into the dynamic but impersonal atoms of twentieth-century American society.

The historical macro-plot is composed of twenty-four micro-plots centered on individual characters, the inhabitants of Winesburg. Some characters appear as supporting players in more than one story, and one figure appears in several: George Willard, a youth working as a reporter in Winesburg's newspaper office. Many characters are connected to George, and his departure at the end brings the whole phase of Winesburg's history to a close.

Anderson prefaces his stories with a list of the tales and a chapter entitled "The Book of the Grotesque." This chapter suggests that a grotesque character comes into being when a man or woman takes one of the many truths of life and pursues it obsessively. Anderson's stories illustrate, often in a few terse pages, how a character becomes trapped by his or her obsession with freedom, lost love, sex, innocence, age, power, money, or indecency.

The first story, "Hands," focuses on an oddball named Wing Biddlebaum, whose hands are always in motion. A friend of George Willard, he is about to tell the youth about his past when he breaks off in fright. Anderson's narrator, however, fills in the story. Once named Adolph Myer, Wing was a teacher in a Pennsylvania town. Much beloved by his boys, he was tender with them in turn. One boy, however, fell in love with Adolph and recounted his fantasies as if they were facts. Branded a pervert, Adolph was beaten and chased away, barely escaping being lynched. He took the name Biddlebaum from a box in a railway station and ended up in Winesburg, tormented by his hands, which in his trauma he blamed for his undeserved suffering.

"Paper Pills" sketches Doctor Reefy, who fills his pockets with bits of paper on which he jots down ideas and inspirations. The narrator connects this peculiarity to the Doctor's courtship of his wife, who visited his office with an illegitimate pregnancy and died less than a year after their marriage. He did not condemn her, and his strange thoughtful nature, represented by the wads of paper, made her love him.

"Mother" reveals the family background of George Willard. His mother Elizabeth, disappointed with her life, has come to despise her husband Tom. Her love for her son is mixed with an anxious hope to be fulfilled through him. George tells his mother that he wants to leave Winesburg, a wish he will eventually carry out after her death.

"The Philosopher" presents the shabby, idle doctor, Doctor Parcival. The doctor tells young George about his family. The... ยป Complete Winesburg, Ohio Summary