Although each of the 25 stories focuses on a different character, the novel’s central plot arc is protagonist George Willard’s gradual coming-of-age. He took a wife and began to raise a family, while running a business in Elyria, Ohio.Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of loosely interconnected short stories that focus on the troubled inhabitants of a small midwestern town. Upon discharge, he attended Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio, and then moved back to Chicago, where he soon gained some success as an advertising writer. He had a reputation as a hard worker and was nicknamed 'Jobby' for taking on a variety of odd jobs around town which occupied him upon dropping out of high school at the age of 14.Īfter a short stint in Chicago as a laborer, Anderson enlisted with a Clyde unit and served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. As a boy, he was a voracious reader known for accessing books through his school library, as there was no public library in the town at that time. His family moved frequently around the state of Ohio, settling in 1884 in Clyde, a frontier town where he lived for twelve formative years. Sherwood was born in 1876 into a family that was less than prosperous. His experiences there left an indelible mark on his consciousness-only to re-emerge many years later in this fictional narrative. The scenes and people in the short story cycle were drawn from Anderson’s formative years in Clyde, Ohio. The stories in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio depict a variety of residents, past and present, and center on George Willard, a young newspaper writer, coming of age in the first decade of the 20th century. Since its publication in 1919, the name “Winesburg” has become synonymous with small town life in the American Heartland. Even a casual glance through a few of the stories leads inevitably to the question: Why are these people all so weird-so grotesque? By contrast, the central character of this short story cycle, George Willard, seems a perfectly normal young man on the brink of maturity and poised to make the life-changing decision to leave Winesburg behind. Winesburg, Ohio presents a galaxy of strange and distorted characters in a small town in Sandusky County, not far from Cleveland, well over one hundred years ago. Sherwood Anderson, Author of Winesburg, Ohio Certainly, I did not write to make fun of these people or to make them ridiculous or ugly, but instead to show by their example what happens to simple, ordinary people-particularly the unsuccessful ones-what life does to us here in America in our times-and on the whole how decent and real we nevertheless are.'

'The book is, of course, in no sense a burlesque, but it is an effort to treat the lives of simple ordinary people in an American Middle Western town with sympathy and understanding….

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson