Similarly, his grotesques seem to be unusually human, interesting, even lovable in spite of their oddness.Īnother way in which Anderson was revolutionary was in his emphasis on the importance of sexual drives in human actions. Anderson describes these people compassionately for, as he himself said, he was 'a writer whose sympathy went out mostly to the little frame houses, on often mean enough streets in American towns, to defeated people, often with thwarted lives.' In 'Paper Pills,' he compares his grotesques to the gnarled apples left in orchards by the pickers who want the best fruit for shipping, yet Anderson contends that often the gnarled apples are the sweetest. What Anderson means becomes clearer as we get acquainted with his grotesques in Winesburg, for each character is in some way deformed, sometimes physically but always psychologically - a caricature of what he might have been. In his introduction to the book, he defines a grotesque as a person who takes one truth to himself, calls it his truth, and tries to live by it although it becomes thereby a false-hood. The typical villagers, therefore, had become what Anderson called grotesques and he intended to name his book The Book of the Grotesque.

Longing to escape inhibiting customs and conventions, his villagers are imprisoned by society's demands and their own inability to distinguish between appearance and reality. Anderson, however, showed the people of Winesburg, Ohio, population 1800, as agonizingly lonely, alienated from one another, and unable to communicate their need for love and understanding. But, generally, Americans still had a rather romantic conception of the charm, warmth, and innocence of small-town life. Naturalists like Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris had shown the ugliness of such cities as Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Earlier realists, like Hamlin Garland in Main Traveled Roads (especially the story 'Under the Lion's Paw'), had shown the harshness and brutalizing monotony of a small farm. In his Memoirs published in 1942, a year after his death, Anderson remarked that Winesburg 'has become a kind of American classic and has been said by many critics to have started a kind of revolution in American short-story writing.' Anderson must have written those words with pleasure for he was a man who liked to be revolutionary, and he was quite accurate when he stated that Winesburg deserved such praise.Īnderson's book was the first work of fiction to expose the hypocrisy, frustration, and inhibition behind the typical small town's facade of gentility.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson