Reading Order
Winesburg OhioSherwood Anderson Winesburg Ohio Reading Order
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is one of the founding texts of American literary modernism — a linked collection of stories about the inhabitants of a fictional small Ohio town, each trapped in their inability to communicate what they most need to say. The 'grotesques' of Winesburg (the word Anderson uses for characters defined by a single truth they have embraced so tightly it has become a deformity) were a direct influence on Hemingway, Faulkner, Raymond Carver, and virtually every subsequent American short story writer.
Where to start
Winesburg, Ohio
Complete Winesburg Ohio Book List
- 1Buy
Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson·1919·Start here — the founding text of the American linked story collection; the Winesburg 'grotesques' and the young journalist George Willard's encounters with them constitute one of the essential portraits of small-town American life and the costs of unexpressed inner lives. - 2Buy
In Our Time
Ernest Hemingway·1925·Hemingway's breakthrough story collection — the direct heir to Winesburg, Ohio in the American short fiction tradition; where Anderson's characters are defined by what they cannot express, Hemingway's are defined by what they refuse to express; both collections organize their short pieces into a portrait of a world through the accumulation of character studies. - 3Buy
Dubliners
James Joyce·1914·Joyce's collection of Dublin stories — published five years before Winesburg, Ohio and independently developing the same formal interest in characters trapped by their inability to escape their circumstances; the Irish parallel to Anderson's American portrait of provincial life and its costs. - 4Buy
Cannery Row
John Steinbeck·1945·Steinbeck's portrait of the Monterey waterfront community shares Winesburg, Ohio's organization around a community of characters rather than a single plot, and its conviction that the people outside the mainstream economic system have a particular kind of insight that the mainstream forecloses. - 5Buy
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway·1929·The fullest expression of the prose method that Winesburg, Ohio helped inspire — what Hemingway developed from Anderson's influence into the 'iceberg theory'; reading both together shows the transformation of a particular American sensibility into a major literary style.
Winesburg Ohio — Frequently Asked Questions
What does "grotesque" mean in Winesburg, Ohio?
Anderson defines his 'grotesques' in the novel's first story ('The Book of the Grotesque'): a grotesque is a person who has taken a truth — one of the many truths about life — and tried to live by it so completely that the truth has become a lie. The baker who believes only in wealth, the teacher who believes only in the importance of education, the priest who believes only in God — each is a grotesque because their single truth has become deformed by its exclusivity. Anderson's insight is that the conditions of small-town American life generate these grotesques by denying people the complexity of experience that would prevent any single truth from becoming absolute.
Who is George Willard and why does he appear in so many stories?
George Willard is the young newspaper reporter who appears as a listener or confidant in many of the Winesburg stories — a young man with literary ambitions who is sensitive enough to hear what the grotesques are trying to say. He functions as Anderson's surrogate and as the reader's point of entry into the community: like us, he is an outsider who is interested in these lives but not trapped by them, and his eventual departure from Winesburg (in the final story) represents the aspiration to art and the wider world that the grotesques have not been able to achieve.
Why did Winesburg, Ohio influence Hemingway?
Hemingway met Anderson in Chicago in 1920 and acknowledged him as the first American writer he had read who showed him what to do with the American short story form — specifically how to organize a story around what is not said rather than what is. Anderson's influence on Hemingway is also visible in the compression of the vignette form: where Anderson's stories build to moments of revelation without conventional plot, Hemingway's build to gaps — the thing not said, the revelation that doesn't happen. They later had a falling out, and Hemingway's The Torrents of Spring is a parody of Anderson, but the debt remained.
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