SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Winesburg, Ohio

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION by Irving Howe

THE TALES AND THE PERSONS

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, a Tale in Four Parts
       I, concerning Jesse Bentley
       II, also concerning Jesse Bentley
       III Surrender, concerning Louise Bentley
       IV Terror, 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

INTRODUCTION

by Irving Howe

I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen
years old when I first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio.
Gripped by these stories and sketches of Sherwood
Anderson's small-town "grotesques," I felt that he
was opening for me new depths of experience,
touching upon half-buried truths which nothing in
my young life had prepared me for.  A New York
City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent
time in the small towns that lay sprinkled across
America, I found myself overwhelmed by the scenes
of wasted life, wasted love--was this the "real"
America?--that Anderson sketched in Winesburg.  In
those days only one other book seemed to offer so
powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy's
Jude the Obscure.

Several years later, as I was about to go overseas
as a soldier, I spent my last weekend pass on a
somewhat quixotic journey to Clyde, Ohio, the town
upon which Winesburg was partly modeled.  Clyde
looked, I suppose, not very different from most
other American towns, and the few of its residents
I tried to engage in talk about Anderson seemed
quite uninterested.  This indifference would not have
surprised him; it certainly should not surprise any-
one who reads his book.

Once freed from the army, I started to write liter-
ary criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biog-
raphy of Anderson.  It came shortly after Lionel
Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an at-
tack from which Anderson's reputation would never
quite recover.  Trilling charged Anderson with in-
dulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of vague
emotional meandering in stories that lacked social