Ohio — Sherwood Anderson

This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work by Sherwood Anderson, which is now, at last, again available to you.

Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside Ohio:

Gripped by these stories and sketches of Sherwood Andersons small-town grotesques, I felt that he was opening for me new depths of experience, touching upon half-buried truths which nothing in my young life had prepared me for.

...By then, I had read writers more complex, perhaps more distinguished than Anderson, but his muted stories kept a firm place in my memories, and the book I wrote might be seen as a gesture of thanks for the light-a glow of darkness, you might say-that he had brought to me.

...Perhaps the central Winesburg story, tracing the basic movements of the book, is Paper Pills, in which the old Doctor Reefy sits in his empty office close by a window that was covered with cobwebs, writes down some thoughts on slips of paper (pyramids of truth, he calls them) and then stuffs them into his pockets where they become round hard balls soon to be discarded.

...After a time the attentive reader will notice in these stories a recurrent pattern of theme and incident: the grotesques, gathering up a little courage, venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in the dark, there to establish some initiatory relationship with George Willard, the young reporter who hasnt yet lived long enough to become a grotesque.

...Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only mentioned him because he, like many of what are called very common people, became the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the writers book.