Winesburg, Ohio (Dover Thrift Editions) - Softcover

Sherwood Anderson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486282694 ISBN 13: 9780486282695

Publisher: Dover Publications, 1995

Synopsis

In this moving collection of interrelated stories, Ohio-born Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) illuminates the loneliness and frustration — spiritual, emotional and artistic — of life in a small American town. Winesburg, Ohio subtly portrays as well a young writer's coming of age, searching for love, yearning for a less stifling world.
Through the eyes of young George Willard, the inner lives of many of Winesburg's inhabitants open to us. Before George leaves the community, we have learned much about his mother Elizabeth, his friend Helen White, his teacher Kate Swift and other Winesburg residents — the lonely, sensitive Dr. Reefy, the tormented Rev. Charles Hartman and the enigmatic Wing Biddlebaum among them.
Through Anderson's art, their stories are woven into a powerful portrayal of community life, and, ironically, of the isolation its close atmosphere can engender. A great success on its first publication in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio profoundly influenced a generation of fiction writers with its deeply moving poetic realism. It endures as a classic portrait of American life.

About this title

Review:

Library Journal praised this edition of Sherwood Anderson's famed short stories as "the finest edition of this seminal work available." Reconstructed to be as close to the original text as possible, Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people.

From the Back Cover:

In 1919 a middle-aged Chicago advertising writer from Ohio, a failure as a businessman, husband, and father, published a slim yellow book of short stories intended to "reform" American literature. Sherwood Anderson strove to portray the buried inner lives of "pathetic grotesques" - people wounded by life in body or spirit - and to tell their stories in short revelations rather than in sweeping novels. Against all expectations, Winesburg Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life accomplished what its author intended. Afterwards, American literature would be written and read differently. Writers of short fiction learned from Anderson to achieve both character-centered form and daring Modernist subject matter. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, authorized by the Sherwood Anderson Literary Estate Trust, is an expert text, in that Ray Lewis White has consulted all Anderson manuscripts, typescripts, letters, diaries, and all editions of the book to present the masterpiece as it was intended. White's edition also is informed by his 35 years of experience in editing, studying, and appreciating Sherwood Anderson and his fiction. New to this edition of Winesburg, Ohio are historical and cultural annotations, documentation of changes of various editions, identification of the Ohio originals of Anderson's characters; and maps of the real town of Clyde, in North Central Ohio, which was the basis of Anderson's fictional account. Included as well are unique photographs of Anderson and Clyde that deepen knowledge and feeling for the author's time and his work.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0486282694
• ISBN 13: 9780486282695
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160