Posted on 05/09/2019 8:09:24 AM PDT by Borges
In the autumn of 1915, while living in a bohemian boardinghouse on Chicago’s Near North Side, Sherwood Anderson began work on a collection of tales describing the tortured lives of the inhabitants of Winesburg, a fictional Ohio town, in the 1890s. Drawing on his own experience growing up in the agricultural hamlet of Clyde, Ohio, he breathed life into a band of neurotic castaways adrift on the flatlands of the Midwest, each of them in their own way struggling — and failing — to locate meaning, personal connection and love amid the town’s elm-shaded streets.
These “grotesques,” as Anderson called them, had allowed doubt and fear to overwhelm their better instincts. They were, the writer believed, casualties of a close-minded culture, condemned to live out a lonely, alienated existence. “Winesburg” quickly became a cultural byword, a metaphor for the yawning emptiness of rural life.
Today that book, “Winesburg, Ohio,” is a staple of high school English classes and an acknowledged classic — No. 24 on the Modern Library’s list of 100 best American novels. But the path that the book, published a century ago on May 8, 1919, took to literary renown was anything but direct.
...
Writing in his memoirs two decades later, Anderson recalled that after “Winesburg” came out, “for weeks and months, my mail was loaded with letters calling me ‘filthy,’ ‘an opener of sewers.’”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
***Today that book, “Winesburg, Ohio,” is a staple of high school English classes and an acknowledged classic***
I have been a prolific reader since 1960, read hundreds of books, and this is the first time I have ever heard of this book.
Never heard of it in High School. We were saddled with pieces of dreck like Silas Mariner and Jane Eyre.
Jane Erye is a landmark.
Same here.
I heard of the author, not that book, though.
“Waiting for Godot” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe”, are decidedly not postmodern. WFG was written in the ‘40s.
Dollars to doughnuts he’s being resurrected because he glorifies homos.
It’s always been a standard text.
This is one of the rare times when I agree with The New York Times. Winesburg, Ohio is a lovely book, well worth a read.
Won’t know unless you read it.
I hear there’s a Comic Book Classics edition. version
I’m going with the audio version: https://archive.org/details/winesburg_ohio_0708_librivox
I had not heard of the author until college.
In high school we had a rigorous American literature course in which all the great 20th American authors were represented.
What I found interesting was that these men ( Faulkner etc. ) were huge fans of Sherwood Anderson. He had to have had an influence on their writing.
Winesburg, Ohio is a magnificent book. Hope you pick up a copy - well worth it.
“Silas Mariner”
I didn’t know he was a seagoing protagonist. Was he weaving linen sails?
He was soon overtaken by younger writers: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck — all took inspiration from “Winesburg,” with its simple, declarative rhythms and steadfast concern for the plight of common people.Hemingway and Faulkner, in particular, sought Anderson’s advice and support, which he happily provided, acting as a mentor to both and helping to get their first books into print. As their fortunes rose and his declined, they sought to distance themselves from Anderson with novels that cruelly mocked his personality and his prose style: Faulkner’s “Mosquitoes” and Hemingway’s “The Torrents of Spring.”
Anderson died in March 1941 of an intestinal infection, having accidentally swallowed a toothpick at a New York cocktail party. But his literary influence continued to be felt — something Faulkner himself later acknowledged. In December 1950, accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, he told the audience in Stockholm’s City Hall that he and his entire generation of American writers were “all of us children of Sherwood Anderson.”
He pioneered depicting small town life as a placid facade that hides all sorts of suppressed neuroses (inspired by then-new Freudian ideas). You could draw a straight line from Winesburg to David Lynch.
I was homeschooled, so I didn’t find Silas Marner or Jane Eyre to be “dreck.” They weren’t as rollicking wonderful as Scarlet Pimpernel, but I enjoyed them.
I was told I could do without Winesburg and its type (modernist dreck), but I read it anyway. Boring, disappointing, and I should have avoided it.
Give me heroes, action or spiritual and preferably both combined.
I agree about Silas Marner. I found that so dull, I could only manage Cliff's Notes on that one. I quite like Jane Eyre, though. We had some good choices when I was in High School. I remember one year we had The Caine Mutiny as a choice.
Herman Wouk turns 104 just two weeks from Monday.
***Was he weaving linen sails?***
I would not know, it was so boring.. On the other hand RODERICK RANDOM by Tobias Smollett was a dull narrative action piece.
I preferred the Hornblower series and Manila Galleon by F. Van Wyck Mason myself.
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