Winesburg, Ohio FROM OUR EDITORS
Widely considered Anderson's masterwork, this book is a series of intertwined vignettes that reveals the secret life of a seemingly placid Midwestern town and the inner desires and dreams of its residents in the early years of the twentieth century.
ANNOTATION
In the perfectly imagined world of an archetypal small American town, Anderson reveals the hidden passions that turn ordinary lives into fonts of unforgettable emotions. Played out against the deceptively placid backdrop of Winesburg, Anderson's loosely connected stories coalesce, like chapters, into a powerful novel of love and loss.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small Ohio town at the end of the nineteenth century.
At the centre is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's 'grotesques' -- solitary figures unable to communicate with others. George is their conduit for expression and solace from loneliness, but he has his own longings which eventually draw him away from home to seek a career in the city. He carries with him the dreams and unuttered words of remarkable characters such as Wing Biddlebaum, the disgraced former teacher, and the story-telling Doctor Parcival.
SYNOPSIS
'Here [is] a new order of short story,' said H. L. Mencken when Winesburg, Ohio was published in 1919. 'It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own.
FROM THE CRITICS
Book Magazine - Rochelle O'Gorman
Anderson's 1919 story collection about the secretive inhabitants of a small town was an instant classic. This production probably looked like a great idea on paper: Gather twenty-five well-known authors, including Richard Ford, Elizabeth Berg, Paul Auster, Richard Russo, Russell Banks and Michael Cunningham, to each read one of the stories. Too bad the end result is uneven and sloppy. While some of the narrators sound natural and convincing, others seem preoccupied and ill prepared. Anderson's characters deserve better.
AudioFile
Sherwood Anderson provides a voyeuristic look into the lives of small-town folks in 1919. Each of the 23 stories in this classic can stand alone, but all come together, as well, demonstrating how one life affects so many others. Townspeople are seen through the eyes of writer-reporter George Willard, either directly through his observations, or indirectly. The variation in narrators can be distracting, although all but one are exceptional. Also, the dialogue portions of each vignette are handled by a performer different from the narrator for the non-dialogue portions of the vignette, and this continual shifting of voices also detracts from the flow of the story. The performance is nicely packaged, though, with appropriate theme music between each of the 23 chapters. All told, a touching collection. H.L.S. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
AudioFile - Susan G. Baird
Sherwood Anderson has been considered the inspiration for American storytelling. Narrator George Guidall perfectly presents the multitude of sketches that make up the town and novel. Diverse generations, class and educational levels, as well as male and female voices, are all realistically handled. It seems likely that the author would have read his work in much the same way that Guidall does. Because this is from a time of different reading and writing styles, the audio version enhances what may be dull reading for a contemporary audience. S.G.B. ﾽAudioFile, Portland, Maine
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
"The only story teller of his generation who left his mark on the style and vision of the generation that followed....Henningway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Coldwell, Saroyan, Henry Miller...each of these owes an unmistakable debth to Anderson." — Malcolm Cowley
"Like Dubliners, Winesburg can be read naturalistically, as the account of individuals trapped by social confinement and paralysis, narrow human experience and puritanical burdens and guilt of American small town life....It's characters are depositories of the untold, trapped in ... pain; a direct utters cannot reveal the truth, the truth being too many." — Malcolm Bradberry
That single moment of aliveness - that epiphany, as Joyce would have called it... was the story Anderson told over and over, but without exhausting its freshness, for the story had as many variations as there were faces in his dreams. — Jonathan Lyons
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