Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of twenty-two interconnected stories by the American writer Sherwood Anderson, published in 1919. Although each story can be read on its own, they share a single setting, a common cast of characters and a psychological atmosphere that makes them work as a whole. The thread running through the book is George Willard, a young reporter on a local newspaper who, from childhood to young adulthood, observes his neighbours and eventually decides he must leave the town. Each story focuses on the inner life of a different character, often revealing a past that unfolds gradually, and on his or her struggle to overcome the loneliness and isolation that seem to pervade the community.

The book was written mostly between late 1915 and early 1916, with a few stories completed closer to publication. Winesburg is a fictional town loosely based on Anderson's childhood memories of Clyde, Ohio, where he lived between the ages of eight and nineteen. Although it does not fit comfortably the mold of the conventional novel, critics usually place it somewhere between a novel and a collection of stories, in the form known as the short story cycle, and have also linked it to the coming-of-age novel, given the development of George.

In style, its plain prose and its interest in the psychology of its characters rather than in plot make Winesburg, Ohio one of the earliest works of modernist literature. The influence of Gertrude Stein, who helped Anderson find a direct voice built on the sentence as the basic unit of prose and on repetition, has often been noted, as has the kinship with Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. The book was well received by critics, though its moral tone and unconventional form raised some reservations. After a period of diminished reputation in the 1930s, it was rediscovered, and it is now considered one of the most influential portraits of pre-industrial rural life in the United States. Its legacy can be seen in later writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck.