Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson · 1919
The first great American story cycle: interconnected tales of "grotesques" in a small Ohio town. Anderson's direct influence on Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck is hard to overstate. This book invented the American short story as a form.
The case against
A theory of the grotesque opens the book, and Anderson then demonstrates it twenty-odd times: a lonely soul approaches George Willard, fails to say the unsayable, retreats. By the eighth tale you can set your watch by the pattern. The plain style that liberated Hemingway reads, at book length, like one note held for two hundred pages.
Short Stories · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
