Winesburg, Ohio | Page 3

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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 or spiritual
solidity. There was a certain cogency in Trilling's attack, at least with
regard to Anderson's inferior work, most of which he wrote after

Wines- burg, Ohio. In my book I tried, somewhat awk- wardly, to bring
together the kinds of judgment Trilling had made with my still keen
affection for the best of Anderson's writings. By then, I had read writers
more complex, perhaps more distinguished than Anderson, but his
muted stories kept a firm place in my memories, and the book I wrote
might be seen as a gesture of thanks for the light--a glow of darkness,
you might say--that he had brought to me.
Decades passed. I no longer read Anderson, per- haps fearing I might
have to surrender an admira- tion of youth. (There are some writers one
should never return to.) But now, in the fullness of age, when asked to
say a few introductory words about Anderson and his work, I have
again fallen under the spell of Winesburg, Ohio, again responded to the
half-spoken desires, the flickers of longing that spot its pages. Naturally,
I now have some changes of response: a few of the stories no longer
haunt me as once they did, but the long story "Godliness," which years
ago I considered a failure, I now see as a quaintly effective account of
the way religious fanaticism and material acquisitiveness can become
intertwined in American experience.