by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 08, 2009   Last Updated: February 17, 2009

Sherwood Anderson was the great American story teller. In "Winesburg, Ohio" he collects the private dramas of each person living in a small town - their hidden pains and their ordinary dreams - and mixes in some dark wisdom from his own haunted life. By the end of the book, the whole community seems vividly alive, and reading the book is an unforgettable experience.

Living in Winesburg is an aging teacher scarred by scandal, and a bitter mother who longs for her son to escape. Each story visits a new character, showing how each one is somehow isolated in their own private loss. There's 22 stories in all, and each character seems to amplify a feeling of loneliness. It creates a real tension for the book's final story about that young man himself. His mother had dreamed of leaving him enough money to escape the town, but she dies before she can pass it along. Will Winesburg become "a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood" - or will it remain the whole canvas?

But Anderson sets up his fantasmagoria of humanity in a brilliant prologue called "The Book of the Groteque." It describes a writer, an old man with a white moustache, who has trouble moving around his house. He remembers the Civil War. He fears death. And he's possessed by the idea of writing a book capturing the long procession of characters he'd imagined when half awake. "All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotseques," Anderson writes. "Some were amusing, some almost beautiful... For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write."

The book has influenced many American authors. Norman Mailer once cited the central premise of the "Book of the Grotesque" - that "All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful." (The old man argues that as soon as a human tried to live his life by a single truth, "he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood." And William Faulkner, a friend of Anderson's, was obviously impressed by the book's structure. Instead of writing a cycle of short stories set in a single town, Faulkner spent his entire life writing novels set in a single town!

Anderson himself lived a sad life - the third of seven children born to an alcoholic, Anderson grew up to have three failed marriages. At the age of 36, he abandoned his wife and three small children after a nervous breakdown. But he was determined to commit himself to the artistic life, and ultimately created characters whose stories seem familiar and yet powerful. They're common people with names like George Willard and John Hardy. (There's a small town in Ohio that claims to have inspired Anderson's original stories.) But the book has a tremendous impact, proving that most powerful struggles often occur in the simplest of souls.

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