Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small town at the end of the nineteenth century. At the center is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's solitary figures. Anderson's stories influenced countless American writers including Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Oates and Carver. This new edition corrects errors made in earlier editions and takes into account major criticism and textual scholarship of the last several decades.

<br>Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, on September 13, 1876, to Irwin and Emma Smith Anderson. His father was an itinerant harness maker and sometime house painter more interested in swapping barroom tales of Civil War adventures than in providing for a wife and seven children. In 1883 the Andersons settled in Clyde, Ohio, a small town in the heartland of America that later served as a model for Winesburg. There young Sherwood, nicknamed 'Jobby' because he was always ready to work, held any number of odd jobs to help support the family. Although he received a spotty education and never finished high school, Anderson possessed an entrepreneurial spirit and always imagined a glorious future for himself. A year or two after his mother's death in 1895, he journeyed to Chicago and found employment in a warehouse but was