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There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped. Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small Ohio town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the centre is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's `grotesques' - solitary figures unable to communicate with others. George is their conduit for expression and solace from loneliness, but he has his own longings which eventually draw him away from home to seek a career in the city. He carries with him the dreams and unuttered words of remarkable characters such as Wing Biddlebaum, the disgraced former teacher, and the story-telling Doctor Parcival. The book has influenced many American writers, including ernest hemingway, William Faulkner, John Updike, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates. It reshaped the development of the modern short story, turning the genre away from an emphasis upon plot towards a capability for illuminating the emotional lives of ordinary people. This new edition corrects errors in earlier editions and takes into account major criticism and textual scholarship of the last several decades.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
You could say the modern American short story was born from this collection: Sherwood not only knew James Joyce but also gave writing advice to Hemingway, Faulkner and god knows who else. You can even see his influence today in Joyce Carol Oates' writing. Sherwood broke away from previous American writers who worked with short stories by interlinking all of the ones in this collection through one character, young reporter George Willard, and looking at small town life with an eye for its "grotesque" and modern reality. George Willard is the one person in town who everyone turns to for their confidences, their hopes, their fears. They are bursting with repressed passion and rage, their dreams often bashed by the realities of humdrum life. But George himself has his own dreams and they slowly become clearer as the stories accumulate. From the faded hotel George lives with his parents to the farms that lie in the outskirts of town, an entire community comes alive as if caught on a silent black and white film. The terrifying realisation for myself was that many small towns are still like this!
This book is referenced in Due Considerations by John Updike. Had never heard of the author previously and was captivated by the stories.There are tiny links in each story to characters from previous tales. I would rank the collection right up there with Dubliners and the collected stories of John Cheever.
By a strange coinicidence, in the same parcel of books delivered by Amazon, I read A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz.In this memoir, Oz credits Winesburg as the spur that encouraged him to write about the ordinary people and places he knew rather than wait for the cataclysmic events he thought were necessary as feed material for good story telling.
In my opinion, the quality of the writing is excellent and has stood the test of time. Am looking forward to reading more from Anderson in the future
By a strange coinicidence, in the same parcel of books delivered by Amazon, I read A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz.In this memoir, Oz credits Winesburg as the spur that encouraged him to write about the ordinary people and places he knew rather than wait for the cataclysmic events he thought were necessary as feed material for good story telling.
In my opinion, the quality of the writing is excellent and has stood the test of time. Am looking forward to reading more from Anderson in the future
The briefest personal summary comment on Winesburg, Ohio:
The town itself, its small-town ambience, its people, their isolation from one another and their essential (indeed, existential) anomie and loneliness in the world have remained memorable to me, even today some thirty-five years or so after I first read the book. Sherwood Anderson had a distinct influence on my own thinking and work, as he did upon others of his generation and after, but he was an original - a path-shower to other writers, less as a recorder of large events and actions but more as an explorer of the subtler workings of the world-small inner man, inimitable in the way he portrayed his characters in their consequent authentic empathetically rounded dimensions.
The town itself, its small-town ambience, its people, their isolation from one another and their essential (indeed, existential) anomie and loneliness in the world have remained memorable to me, even today some thirty-five years or so after I first read the book. Sherwood Anderson had a distinct influence on my own thinking and work, as he did upon others of his generation and after, but he was an original - a path-shower to other writers, less as a recorder of large events and actions but more as an explorer of the subtler workings of the world-small inner man, inimitable in the way he portrayed his characters in their consequent authentic empathetically rounded dimensions.
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