“Winesburg, Ohio” at 100

In the fall of 1915, Sherwood Anderson was working as a copywriter in Chicago and living in a rented room that overlooked the Loop. Anderson enjoyed the view from his window and had moved his bed closer to it so he could see the vista of Chicago below him—the great Midwestern city where he had lived twice before. In his spare hours, Anderson labored over other kinds of writing, just as he had done for years. He had completed two novels that would be in print before long—Windy McPherson’s Son (1916) and Marching Men (1917). He had also worked at a manuscript about a young writer named Talbot Whittingham. But now his creative direction had taken a turn.

One night that autumn, Anderson sat down at his table and wrote a story—a story about an old man, a writer, who hires a carpenter to build a platform upon which his bed can rest so he can better look out the window below, much like Anderson in his Chicago room. Then Anderson wrote another story, a tale about an outcast man living near a little town in northwest Ohio near Lake Erie. The man, whose name is Wing Biddlebaum, resides in a decaying house in farm country. Wing was once a gifted teacher with a habit of using his hands expressively, sometimes tousling the hair of the boys in his charge or patting them on the shoulders. One disturbed youth had made a false accusation of molestation against the man. Wing managed to escape before enraged townspeople caught up with him. He changed his name and made his way to the little town of Winesburg, Ohio, where he lives a solitary life. The one notable exception to his solitude is his conversations with a young reporter named George Willard.

The first story described above is “The Book of The Grotesque,” the introduction to Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson’s seminal short story collection first published one hundred years ago on May 8, 1919 by B. W. Huebsch.  This second tale is “Hands,” one of the most well-known and frequently anthologized pieces from the book. Anderson wrote in his Memoirs that when he finished “Hands,” he felt he had made a creative breakthrough, that he had reached a new depth and breadth of expression. Other stories followed, with most of them written in the fall and winter of 1915-1916. Many of them first appeared in little magazines.

Many were written in one sitting, then carefully revised. It wasn’t long before “Hands” was published in the Masses in February of 1916, but he was still a little under four years away from seeing the collection of tales in book form. Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men would appear before Winesburg, along with a collection of free verse poems called Mid-American Chants, published in 1918.

Anderson would publish other books after Winesburg, Ohio, but this short story collection remains his best-known and most influential book. It is a lasting work of American literature that has influenced renowned twentieth century writers, such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. It is also an excellent example of the short story cycle, a collection of interlocked tales with common themes and characters. Anderson did much to popularize the form in American literature.

The collection begins with an introduction: the previously noted “The Book of the Grotesque,” in which Anderson relates the tale of the aged writer who hires the carpenter to build the platform for his bed. The carpenter and the writer get to know one another. They sit and talk and smoke cigars. The carpenter is a Civil War veteran who lost his brother at the notorious Confederate prison camp Andersonville in Georgia. In this story Anderson introduces an idea that is a keystone of Winesburg, Ohio–the concept that “in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a 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 problem, however, is that “the people came along” and that “the moment one of the people took the truths to himself, called it his truth and tried to live by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”

The stories of Winesburg, Ohio are the tales of these grotesques, but the term can be misleading. These are not horrifying or disturbing people—they are people of decency and sensitivity who have been warped by some element of their surroundings and who are starved for love, meaning, or even just simple human connection. Many of the people are actually possessed of some kind of gift, hidden beauty of spirit or potential. They are much like the “twisted apples” described in the famous Winesburg story “Paper Pills.” Anderson describes cast off apples found in the autumn in Winesburg’s orchards: “One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all the sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.”

There is a marvelous compassion that runs through Winesburg, Ohio. We join George Willard in uncovering the past of Wash Williams, the misogynist and unhygienic telegraph operator in Winesburg, and we learn how he became the man he is. We witness the loneliness of Kate Swift, Alice Hindman and Enoch Robinson. We get a glimpse into the soul of Dr. Parcival, a man who hopes George Willard will “write the book that I may never get written,” a man who has discovered that “everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.” We also meet some of Winesburg’s hardier souls, such as Dr. Reefy, Joe Welling, and Tom Foster.

There is an actual town of Winesburg, Ohio, of which Anderson was unaware of when he wrote his stories. This real Winesburg is located in east central Ohio in Holmes County, a stronghold of the state’s Amish culture. The town’s name was once spelled “Weinsburg,” reflecting the German origins of its early European settlers. The fictional Winesburg bears a strong resemblance to Anderson’s hometown of Clyde, where he lived from early childhood to the age of twenty-one, when he left for Chicago. He returned to Clyde for a short time in 1899 after his Spanish American War service before attending Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio to complete his high school education.

Like Clyde, Anderson’s Winesburg is located in northwest Ohio. It is a small town surrounded by farmland producing cabbages and cherries. The street names in both towns are similar. The features of small town American life are here: the railroad and its depot; taverns; churches. There are cottages and small houses owned by workers, artisans, and shopkeepers. There are also the more elegant homes of the well-to-do, such as the house of George’s friend Helen White. There is a fairground, an important setting in Anderson’s beautiful and elegiac story “Sophistication.”

The similarity of Winesburg, Ohio to  Clyde is striking. Both towns are located eighteen miles south of Lake Erie. Each town has a Waterworks Pond below a hill: Gospel Hill in the book and Piety Hill in Clyde. Both towns have a Heffner Block.

Like Winesburg, Clyde had a fairgrounds and race track located near the Waterworks Pond. The fairgrounds and race track site in Clyde is now home to an elementary school, but the Waterworks Pond is still nearby in the town’s Community Park, where Raccoon Creek follows the course of Wine Creek in Anderson’s fictional town.

The New Willard House hotel is based on the Empire House Hotel in Clyde. Clyde has a Main Street running through it, with streets named Buckeye and Duane, as does Winesburg. There is a Presbyterian church in Clyde that is the model for Reverend Hartman’s in Winesburg where he sees the naked Kate Swift in her bedroom from the window of his bell tower study.

Much of the action in Winesburg takes place in the mid 1890s, except for instances when the characters revisit earlier times through memories or spoken recollection, or when Anderson tells a tale set partially in earlier days, such as the four-part story called “Godliness.” One of the few topical references in the book occurs during an argument between George Willard’s father and some other men concerning President William McKinley and his famous adviser Mark Hanna, a Cleveland businessman.

There are a number of recurring characters in the book, but the central character is George Willard, a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle. His father owns the New Willard House where George lives with his parents. His father, a Democrat, has political ambitions unlikely to be realized in the Republican stronghold of northwestern Ohio during the Gilded Age. George’s mother Elizabeth is a middle-aged woman scarred by smallpox who serves as the hotel housekeeper. She is a lonely woman who harbors great hopes for her son.

George Willard becomes the confidante to many of the lonely people in town. There is something about the young man that compels people to open up to him. Winesburg, Ohio can be considered a bildungsroman, a story of a youth’s transition from innocence to knowledge of the adult world. We might also consider it somewhat of a kunstlerroman, a story of an artist’s growth to maturity as George Willard is a writer who grows in empathy in the course of the stories. He goes from being a small town journalist chasing down the bits and pieces of news to fill the Winesburg Eagle to a man who tells his mother that he “wants to get away and look at people and think.” His callowness is on full display in the story “The Thinker.” Earlier in the story we hear George’s father, an inveterate talker, arguing with the men about McKinley and Mark Hanna. George seems like a younger version of his father, glib and full of talk.

The idea that George Willard would some day become a writer had given him a place of distinction in Winesburg, and to Seth Richmond he talked continually of the matter. “It’s the easiest of lives to live,” he declared, becoming excited and boastful. “Here and there you go and there is no one to boss you. Though you are in India or in the South Seas in a boat, you have but to write and there you are. Wait till I get my name up and then see what fun I shall have.”
In George Willard’s room, which had a window looking down into an alleyway and one that looked across railroad tracks to Biff Carter’s Lunch Room facing the railroad station, Seth Richmond sat in a chair and looked at the floor. George Willard who had been sitting for an hour idly playing with a lead pencil, greeted him effusively. “I’ve been trying to write a love story,” he explained, laughing nervously. Lighting a pipe he began walking up and down. “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to fall in love. I’ve been sitting here and thinking it over and I’m going to do it.”

George tries to persuade Seth to tell Helen White that he (George) is interested in her, but Seth leaves the room in disgust and goes to Helen White’s house, where he manages to impress Helen for a while and she kisses him. This passage above shows the callowness of George as both writer and young adult. His view of writing is shallow, and he is insensitive to the feelings of his friend and to Helen. He is looking for “raw material” as a writer and hasn’t understood that to grow as man and artist that he needs to really listen, to observe, and to respond to other people in their entirety.

The teacher Kate Swift tells him “You will have to know life,” adding that “If you are to become a writer you have to stop fooling with words.” She also cautions him with a warning that “You must not be a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.” Wing Biddlebaum tells George, “You are destroying yourself….You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them.” Fortunately for George, he begins to learn, especially from the lonely and misunderstood people in town. By “Sophistication,” the next to last story in the book, we see a very different George Willard, one who “loves life so intensely that tears come into his eyes.”

At the end of the cycle, in the last story appropriately entitled “Departure,” George Willard boards a train to leave Winesburg. Although he is leaving his town behind to venture into the world, a love for the town and its people suffuses this simple narrative. He has become open to life’s possibilities and has seen the inherent worth and dignity of the people around him.

“Departure,” for me, hits a deep level. There are echoes here of the experience of any young person leaving behind a familiar world and the days of childhood and youth for a deeper initiation into life, whether it is entering the military, going off to college or entering the world of work after school days come to an end. As he sits on the train, he looks out upon familiar scenes and neighbors and realizes boyhood is over.

One noteworthy feature of setting in Winesburg, Ohio is the amount of dramatic action that occurs after dark, which seems appropriate given the fact that the repressed or hidden lives of these characters are so important, and that revelation of desires, memories, and pain is not something these people want seen in the light of day. Night is also a time associated with sexual encounters or romantic liaisons. George Willard’s sexual assignation with Louise Trunion in “Nobody Knows” occurs at night in the countryside outside of town.

She has sent him a note brazenly telling him she is his for the taking, but she is the kind of working class girl George doesn’t want to be seen with in town. This story is one of a number in the book addressing sexual matters in some fashion, and here we see an all too common male double standard in action. The girl George is romantically attracted to—and more socially acceptable—is the banker’s daughter Helen White, but Louise offers George a taste of sexual experience—which has to be done under the cover of darkness.

Other examples of stories with night settings include the woman Alice Hindman, who impulsively undresses one night and goes out into the rain in “Adventure,” the tales “The Strength of God,” concerning Kate Swift and Reverend Hartman, “The Teacher,” about Kate Swift and George Willard, and “The Thinker,” about Seth Richmond, Helen White and, to a lesser degree, George Willard.

However, there is one notable exception in Winesburg, Ohio in which the night is not a time for the expression of repressed desires or confession of thwarted dreams. The night can be a time of transformation and beauty, which is the case in “Sophistication,” one of the loveliest and most poignant of the Winesburg cycle, and one of my all time favorite short stories. In “Sophistication,” George Willard and Helen White spend some delightful time together on the empty fairgrounds and understand their childhood is over and adulthood is upon them. In a few short pages Anderson conveys a bittersweet knowledge of life, youth, and mortality that I find deeply impressive.

The story’s placement is also perfect within the collection as it occurs between the tale of Elizabeth Willard’s death and the departure of George Willard from Winesburg, serving as a kind of bridge. The death of his mother has naturally had a profound impact on George Willard, and we learn in “Sophistication” that “He was about to leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city newspaper and he felt grown up. The mood that had taken possession of him was a thing known to men and unknown to boys. He felt old and a little tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind his new sense of maturity set him apart, made him a half tragic figure. He wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother’s death.”

The critical responses to Winesburg from the time are instructive. The book was controversial as sex was a topic dealt with throughout the book. An anonymous review in the New York Sun on June 1, 1919 was entitled “A Gutter Would Be Spoon River.” This reviewer compared Anderson’s book unfavorably to Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 work of poetry Spoon River Anthology and found Winesburg, Ohio lacking. The critic complained that the book would mostly appeal to the morbid, to those who like to look at diseased organs and so on. Other reviews were positive and lauded the book as a breakthrough in realistic treatment of American life. In fact, Burton Rascoe, an editor and author and one of the reviewers who praised the book, took a shot at the anonymous critic from the New York Sun and described this critic as an “inert and vegetative organism.” !!

Too often Winesburg, Ohio has been characterized in a facile way in literary history as a “revolt from the village” kind of book. As Jon Lauck notes in his book From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism (2016), the whole notion of the “revolt from the village” stems from a series of articles by Carl van Doren that appeared in the Nation in 1921. Carl van Doren characterized many works of Midwestern literature as repudiations of the sterility and cultural backwardness of village life. This one-note take on Midwestern writing sounded by van Doren began to dominate discussion of Midwestern literature for much of the twentieth century, to the detriment of nuanced understanding of the region, its people, and its writing. The matter is far more complex.

What is true is that these writers followed and articulated their visions of life, and these included portraits of loneliness, alienation, and isolation. The scholar Rex Burbank notes the following about the Winesburg stories in his study of Sherwood Anderson: “In the portrayal of all of these defeated people a vision of American small town life emerges in which we see a society that has no cultural framework from which to draw common experiences; no code of manners by which to initiate, guide, and sustain meaningful relationships among individuals; no art to provide a communion of shared feeling and thought; and no established traditions by which to direct and balance their lives. They live in the midst of cultural failure.”

This is a harsh assessment of the culture of Winesburg—perhaps one can add that this is the case for the grotesques, but not for others. I find it interesting to contrast Burbank’s statement with the later non-fiction writing of Anderson’s about small town life in which Anderson writes of the things Burbank says Winesburg lacks. I would venture to say that Anderson would identify the key problems of the grotesques—and the society in which they live–as ones of communion and connection. Anderson is troubled by the separation of one from another, by people’s unwillingness to accept others as they are, and by individuals being cut off from their own desires, talents, and potential, along with their own capacities for love and creative action. Manners, art and tradition are important, but without the undergirding powers of love and compassion they are so much sounding brass.

The concern about fragmented culture is a hallmark of modern literature in the U.S. and elsewhere in the past one hundred years. Any survey of well known works of literature throughout the world demonstrates that the themes of muteness, alienation and cultural breakdown are pervasive.

We see them in Eliot’s hollow men, in Camus’ characters struggling to assert themselves in meaningful ways, in Hemingway’s characters seeking to live by a code in a world without values. Writers such as Anderson demonstrated that life in the village was much like life elsewhere, and for those who held a rosy view of small town life, writers like him were disturbing. Anderson and others plumbed the depths of the human condition, the darker elements of which can be found in city, small town, and rural hamlet. We are all resident in Winesburg.

Anderson and others from the Midwest, such as Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, and Ruth Suckow had much more complex and ambivalent feelings about these small American communities, a fact often overlooked in the “Revolt From The Village” approach towards Midwestern letters.  Concern and criticism were commingled with love, compassion, and generosity of spirit. A careful reading of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street shows that the satirist coexisted alongside a writer who saw the humanity and depth in people. Anderson even found his way back to a small community. After many years of living a peripatetic existence, much of it in cities, Anderson settled in the small Virginia town of Marion, where he built a lovely house and for a while owned and operated two newspapers. 

Anderson enjoyed his time in Marion, the people there and the surrounding countryside. Anderson’s last book is the wonderfully elegiac Home Town, published shortly before his death in early 1941. It is a book that looks lovingly at the American small town and its people, written by a man who had seen and felt much and knew the small town well. We might say that Anderson writes in Home Town of the more positive side of Winesburg. The critic Maxwell Geismar once described Sherwood Anderson as “the last of the townsmen.”

What is lost in the revolt from the village notion is the concern writers like Anderson had for small communities and rural America. Anderson’s novel Poor White (1920) is concerned with large part with the disruption to village life and older traditions of craftsmanship by the arrival of factories and industrialism. While Anderson was aware of the limitations of small town communities, he was also aware of how larger forces operated on these towns and created conditions that were problematic for the people living in them. It is time to move beyond the “revolt from the village” and see these works of Midwestern literature anew.

The captivating power these stories have raises the question of how Anderson came to write them. What motivated him? What was the spark that animated this work? How does one writer tap that deeper vein that results in a powerful work that endures for years, or even centuries? Anderson had been writing since the early twentieth century, with his more serious creative efforts beginning around 1909. As noted earlier, he had already composed Marching Men and Windy McPherson’s Son, interesting works which sound some important Anderson themes, but not considered among the top tier of his work. He had also worked on Talbot Whittingham, which was never published. He had written notes and sketches and other material.

After he composed the bulk of the Winesburg cycle he experienced another burst of inspiration that resulted in the collection of free verse poems called Mid-American Chants, which appeared in 1918—not among his best work, but interesting in his development and freeing for Anderson, and they had the specific value of highlighting for Anderson the importance of his Midwestern background. 

The famous collection of poems by Edgar Lee Masters called Spoon River Anthology has often been mentioned in connection to Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson had read Spoon River Anthology prior to beginning the Winesburg pieces––he read it in the course of one night, which shows that it grabbed hold of him—and it is reasonable to suppose it had some influence on him. Anderson told others he was impressed by the work. There is a similarity in the works. Both concern the shadowy sides of small town life, the power of the past, regret, and betrayal. Quite often, as in Winesburg, there has been some incident or failure of nerve or missed opportunity that has left a lasting mark on the characters. But there are substantial differences in the works.

The most obvious is genre as Spoon River Anthology is a work of poetry characterized by monologues spoken by the dead of Spoon River. Some speak in general terms of their lives; others are bitter and angry and focus on an especially painful event, series of events or relationship. Often the central issue that animates these voices is baldly stated. At times there is anger about specific injustices related to money, power, and politics. Others concern romantic or sexual relationships. Denunciation of some other individual—family member, town editor, judge, etc—is common in Spoon River Anthology. Masters had been reading the epigrams of the Greek Anthology, a work that inspired the form of Spoon River. A visit by his mother to Chicago where she met with her son and spoke at length about old times back home stirred Masters and Spoon River Anthology resulted.

But it is hard to tell if this book had any dramatic influence on creating Winesburg, Ohio. It is not unusual for artists to be exploring similar ideas around a certain time. At most it might have awakened Anderson more to this theme of buried life and quickened something that had been building in him for some time. The quick composition of many of these tales suggests that this material had been gathering and percolating.

Anderson’s work often has an oral quality. He had grown up hearing men tell stories in taverns, at the race track, around campfires when he served in the Ohio National Guard, by storefronts and railroad depots. He was a devoted reader who had particular affection for Russian writers such as Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. He also especially liked  an interesting English writer named George Borrow who wrote tales based on his travels around Europe and encounters with Romany people.

Ultimately the origins of his book come back to the man himself and the path that brought him to the rooming house in Chicago. Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio in 1876 and lived briefly there and a couple of other Ohio towns before the family settled in Clyde. His father, who had once been a harness maker with his own business, became a restless and improvident man more fond of drinking and telling stories of his Civil War service, leaving his wife Emma to take in laundry and do other domestic work to help provide for the family. She died in 1895, and Anderson’s father left home not long after, eventually dying at a veterans’ home in Dayton in May of 1919–the month when Winesburg, Ohio was published. Anderson never saw him again after he left Clyde. There are echoes of his parents in the characters of George and Elizabeth Willard.

Anderson learned to work when young, becoming a paperboy, stable groom, farm hand, and factory worker. He was well acquainted with rough men from an early age and quickly became an astute observer of the distance between private life and public appearance in the lives of his neighbors. He was a soldier in the Spanish-American War. In the industrial neighborhoods of Chicago he had worked long, exhausting hours in a warehouse and seen vice and despair around him. On these Chicago streets he noticed male prostitutes who lived near his rooming house, men who wore makeup, and Anderson wondered about these strange creatures. Others belittled them, but not Anderson, and one of the painted men told him on the street one day that they had noticed that Anderson didn’t insult them. He was a man who made the rare leap from blue collar to white collar employment when he became an advertising salesman and copywriter and eventually president of a manufacturing company in Elyria, Ohio.

He married an upper class woman from Toledo named Cornelia Lane, the first of his four wives, and had three children with her, but he was miserable in his marriage and business career, and with his fellow businessmen he often drank to excess and hired prostitutes, becoming disgusted with himself and his fellows and noticing how miserable they all were beneath their bonhomie. Sherwood Anderson had seen quite a lot by the time he sat down at his desk in that Chicago boarding house. If there was anyone who was primed to write these stories of frustrated lives and missed chances, it was Sherwood Anderson.

Given the fact that Anderson spent the bulk of his childhood and youth in Clyde, along with the fact that there are so many geographical similarities between the towns, readers may wonder how people in Clyde responded to his book. Anderson did not have the kind of anger and resentment directed towards him that a writer like Thomas Wolfe did, who wrote such overtly autobiographical novels about his life and town. There were people who were irritated with Anderson, and one story has circulated down the years that the town librarian burned his book. I have heard while visiting Clyde that there were people who were unhappy with him in the years after publication, but this was something that faded over time, especially after mid-century.

There is also the question of how closely some of the characters in Winesburg, Ohio are based on real people. Karl Anderson, Sherwood’s older brother and a gifted painter and illustrator who achieved his own degree of fame, stated that “The characters in the book were suggested by certain personages in Clyde, but the stories were born of his imagination.”

Here is what Anderson himself said:

“I myself remember with what a shock I heard people say that one of my own books, Winesburg, Ohio, was an exact picture of Ohio village life. The book was written in a crowded tenement district of Chicago. The hint for almost every character was taken from my fellow lodgers in a large rooming house, many of whom had never lived in a village. The confusion arises out of the fact that others besides practicing artists have imagination. But most people are afraid to trust their imagination and the artist is not.”

What seems reasonable to presume is that these characters were shaped in the conscious and unconscious mind of Sherwood Anderson, that they were shaped by people and experiences that were part of his nearly forty years of living when he began composing these stories, and that they are the result of an artist heeding his vision and shaping it into powerful works of writing.

There are two people who linger in the shadows of Winesburg, Ohio’s creation, and these two people lie side by side in the McPherson Cemetery in Clyde, Ohio: they are Sherwood’s mother and brother—Emma and Earl Anderson.

Sherwood Anderson always had a great devotion to his mother and bitterly resented his father’s neglect of the family and his wife. Winesburg, Ohio is dedicated to Emma Anderson: 

“To the memory of my mother, Emma Smith Anderson, whose keen observation on the life about her first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives, this book is dedicated.”

Sherwood also had a special affection for his brother Earl, the youngest of the Anderson children. Earl was a gifted and thoughtful man who had lived for a while with Anderson and his family in Elyria and worked at the Anderson Manufacturing Company in town. He had briefly studied art in Chicago before coming to Elyria. Earl had always felt that his mother didn’t want him and had often felt somewhat rejected within the family circle. Sherwood and his family disagreed, although Sherwood had noted on occasion that the family’s straitened circumstances and each member’s need to seek out opportunity hadn’t encouraged family closeness. But the fact remains that he and Sherwood were close. 

Earl later served in the U.S. Navy during the First World War. He also lost contact with Sherwood and his other siblings for a number of years until he was found sick on a street in New York City and finally established contact again with his family. He died in 1927 and is buried next to the mother he had long believed rejected him. Karl Anderson believed that Earl’s melancholy presence was behind some of the characters in Winesburg, Ohio.

Winesburg, Ohio is one of my favorite books. I was a high school sophomore when I first read it. I wanted to be a writer and was eagerly discovering the great American authors. I checked out a beat-up Modern Library edition copy of Winesburg, Ohio from the Greenhills Branch Library in Greenhills, Ohio in the early spring of 1982. I was taken with the book’s moody quality and its tales of stunted lives. I was also reminded of my father’s hometown of Mount Vernon, Ohio, one of the Buckeye state’s oldest towns, a place where the past was always a powerful and persistent presence when we visited my grandmother there. My dad’s old working class neighborhood in the west end of Mount Vernon was a world far removed from my home in suburban Cincinnati, but I connected it with the Winesburg I imagined after reading the book, and I could picture Joe Welling or Helen White on its old streets one hundred years before.

As the years passed, I dipped back into Winesburg, Ohio off and on, always impressed by Anderson’s powerful prose and poignant characters. A few years ago I reread it from start to finish. I was different now, and so was Winesburg, Ohio. Many of my older relatives and other adults known to me since childhood were gone, people from the generation shaped by the Depression and World War II. With their passing was also the sense of a passing order, an older America closely bound to the world Anderson knew. Greenhills, Ohio, a town built by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, had fallen into decrepitude. The high school I attended no longer existed, having merged with another school. I was middle-aged.

No longer full of easy answers, and having learned hard lessons and experienced disappointments, I could feel more deeply the loneliness and lostness of Winesburg’s troubled souls. I saw, in the lives of people I knew and in my own, much that was shared by these people of Winesburg. Anderson’s book had taken on a kind of weight and power impossible to know years earlier. There are some books we appreciate more as we grow older. For me, Winesburg, Ohio is one of them.

I have made two trips to Clyde so far, and as a fan of Anderson’s work and someone passionately interested in both literature and literary history, I have greatly enjoyed walking this town and traveling through the surrounding landscape that bears such a strong relation to its fictional counterpart. For the devoted reader of a particular author, there can be a lot of fun in visiting actual places where fictional action occurs—Joyce’s Dublin, for example, or William Kennedy’s Albany or Proust’s Paris. But I believe there is an interesting twist to this kind of pleasure with Anderson’s Clyde and Winesburg.

It is a kind of archaeological discovery of sorts, finding the real place that is the foundation of a fictional place, the substratum that worked upon Anderson’s imagination and led to his creation of Winesburg. Anderson is, like William Faulkner, a writer he deeply influenced, the “sole owner and proprietor” of Winesburg, just as Faulkner described himself on a map he drew of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. There is a map of the town that is reproduced in most editions of Winesburg, Ohio. Interested readers can check out an earlier post on this blog entitled “Going Home To Winesburg: Sherwood Anderson’s Clyde, Ohio” for more information on the town itself in relation to Anderson’s famous short story cycle.

If you visit Clyde, be sure to check out the excellent Clyde Museum, which has an interesting collection of items related to Anderson and his family. The museum is loaded with many fascinating pieces of Clyde’s history. Be sure to also visit the Thaddeus B. Hurd Room of the Clyde Public Library. Thad Hurd was the son of Anderson’s boyhood friend Herman Hurd. Thad Hurd did much to preseve Clyde history and the history of Anderson and his family in the town. His dedication is a wonderful example of the local historian who bequeaths a valuable legacy of knowledge to benefit future generations.

It is now seventy-eight years since Sherwood Anderson died, and now it has been a century since his best known book appeared. The critic Malcolm Cowley wrote, “The older critics scolded him, the younger ones praised him, as a man of the changing hour, yet he managed in that early work and others to be relatively timeless. There are moments in American life to which he gave not only the first but the final expression. He soon became a writer’s writer, the only story teller of his generation who left his mark on the style and vision of the generation that followed. Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Saroyan, Henry Miller….each of these owes an unmistakeable debt to Anderson, and their names might stand for dozens of others.”

There is a town, a little town in northwest Ohio, where it is always about 1895. To get there you only have to open a book. Then you can walk among its people, stand upon its streets. From the early morning to late evening the trains come into the depot. At night a man goes about lighting the lamps. The evening sky is crowded with stars. In the Indian summer warmth of late autumn you can walk through the old fairgrounds where a young man and a young woman chase each other through the darkness.  And out of the darkness other faces appear, and one by one the people step forward and tell their stories, and in the telling they are beautiful, and one by one they stand revealed, as old as Time and young as today, there in Winesburg, long, long ago. 

Patrick Kerin 

Sources:

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Introduction by Malcolm Cowley. Penguin Books, New York: 1979. B.H. Huebsch, 1919. Winesburg, Ohio was originally published on May 8, 1919 by B.H. Huebsch.

Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, Volume 1 by Walter B. Rideout. Introduction by Charles Modlin. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. 2007.

Sherwood Anderson by Kim Townsend. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. 1987.

Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition. Edited by Ray Lewis White. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. 1942, 1969.

The Merrill Studies in Winesburg, Ohio, compiled by Ray Lewis White. Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, Columbus, Ohio. 1971.

The Road To Winesburg: A Mosaic of the Imaginative Life of Sherwood Anderson by William A. Sutton. The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Metuchen, New Jersey. 1972.

Sherwood Anderson by Rex Burbank. Twayne Publishers, Boston. 1964.

From Warm Center To Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1965 by Jon K. Lauck. University of Iowa Press: Iowa City. 2017