Winesburg, Ohio

Before John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford, there was Sherwood Anderson, who, with Winesburg, Ohio, charted a new direction in American fiction — evoking with lyrical simplicity quiet moments of epiphany in the lives of ordinary men and women. In a bed, elevated so that he can peer out the window, an old writer contemplates the fluttering of his heart and considers, as if viewing a pageant, the inhabitants of a small midwestern town. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy. "It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing," wrote H.L. Mencken, "that the book is lifted into a category all its own." With commentary by Sherwood Anderson, Rebecca West, and Hart Crane.