Smith understood that the stories were not in any way about his own municipality-and said as much in his study. Smith, who privately printed a thin book called An Authentic History of Winesburg, Holmes County, Ohio in 1930 and sent a copy to Anderson. “It was no doubt stupid of me,” he later admitted to the local Methodist minister, Arthur H. Soon after the book was published in 1919, Anderson discovered-to his dismay-that there was a real town in Ohio with the name of Winesburg. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the area now proudly hypes its connection to their native son and has even set aside his birthday, September 13, as Sherwood Anderson Day. Because some residents felt they or their neighbors were depicted in unflattering or indelicate ways, the inhabitants of Clyde ignored the book for many years and disdained any comparison to Anderson’s fictional town.
Ingram points out that there are five tales before and five after in which Anderson makes explicit this motif, often caused by an “attempt to establish contact with another Winesburger, to transcend one’s self-containment and isolation.” Or as the best-selling novelist Tom Perrotta adds, “ Winesburg, Ohio feels like a village full of eccentric strangers desperate for a moment of connection,” and reading the book reminds him of “wandering the quiet night-time streets of my hometown, slowly coming to realize that the people I knew were more complicated and interesting than they appeared.”īiographers have often pointed out that Winesburg resembles in essential ways the town of Clyde, where Anderson spent most of his childhood in the late 1800s critical editions of the stories often identity various landmarks and events with their fictional counterparts. In his study of famous story cycles, Forrest L.
In many of the interrelated stories collected in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the word “adventure” is used to indicate (in the words of literary scholar Ray Lewis White) “the one brief moment, the one epiphany, the one telling instant, that captures and communicates the essence of that character’s personality, leaving nothing more to be said or learned about him or her.” Among the stories featuring such epiphanies, Anderson placed the story titled “Adventure” in the middle. “ Certain Things Last” (with audio by Ben Marcus)Īlone (1911), oil on cardboard by American artist Frank Coburn (1862–1938).Other Story of the Week selections by Sherwood Anderson “ Mother” (with audio by Patricia Hampl).“Small-Town Winesburg Reminds Writer of Home” (Tom Perrotta, All Things Considered)Ĭommentary: Sherwood Anderson: “Adventure” (Trevor Berrett, The Mookse and the Gripes)
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