A quiet, stark volume of nearly plotless biographical sketches, Winesburg was a two-fold Big Bang in American literary history: Its prose style, a deviously intimate third-person omniscience that left no character’s innermost shame unexamined, invented an entire branch of our country’s fiction focused on anonymous, troubled lives, while its overlapping, episodic structure inaugurated the “novel in stories.” These are powerful legacies, perhaps too powerful to overcome: A century on, Anderson is rarely thought of for anything but Winesburg, Ohio, when he is thought of at all. In 1919, after his first marriage had ended, his family had dissolved, and his career as a mail-order businessman had been tossed aside for artistic dreams, 42-year-old Sherwood Anderson published Winesburg, Ohio, his fourth book of an eventual 27.
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