ranked as a significant literary figure.  In 1921 the dis-
tinguished literary magazine The Dial awarded him its
first annual literary prize of $2,000, the significance
of which is perhaps best understood if one also
knows that the second recipient was T. S. Eliot.  But
Anderson's moment of glory was brief, no more
than a decade, and sadly, the remaining years until
his death in 1940 were marked by a sharp decline
in his literary standing.  Somehow, except for an oc-
casional story like the haunting "Death in the
Woods," he was unable to repeat or surpass his
early success.  Still, about Winesburg, Ohio and a
small number of stories like "The Egg" and "The
Man Who Became a Woman" there has rarely been
any critical doubt.

No sooner did Winesburg, Ohio make its appear-
ance than a number of critical labels were fixed on it:
the revolt against the village, the espousal of sexual
freedom, the deepening of American realism.  Such
tags may once have had their point, but by now
they seem dated and stale.  The revolt against the
village (about which Anderson was always ambiva-
lent) has faded into history.  The espousal of sexual
freedom would soon be exceeded in boldness by
other writers.  And as for the effort to place Wines-
burg, Ohio in a tradition of American realism, that
now seems dubious.  Only rarely is the object of An-
derson's stories social verisimilitude, or the "photo-
graphing" of familiar appearances, in the sense, say,
that one might use to describe a novel by Theodore
Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis.  Only occasionally, and
then with a very light touch, does Anderson try to
fill out the social arrangements of his imaginary
town--although the fact that his stories are set in a
mid-American place like Winesburg does constitute
an important formative condition.  You might even
say, with only slight overstatement, that what An-
derson is doing in Winesburg, Ohio could be de-
scribed as "antirealistic," fictions notable less for
precise locale and social detail than for a highly per-
sonal, even strange vision of American life.  Narrow,
intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book
about extreme states of being, the collapse of men
and women who have lost their psychic bearings
and now hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the
little community in which they live.  It would be a
gross mistake, though not one likely to occur by
now, if we were to take Winesburg, Ohio as a social
photograph of "the typical small town" (whatever
that might be.) Anderson evokes a depressed land-
scape in which lost souls wander about; they make
their flitting appearances mostly in the darkness of
night, these stumps and shades of humanity.  This
vision has its truth, and at its best it is a terrible if
narrow truth--but it is itself also grotesque, with the
tone of the authorial voice and the mode of composi-
tion forming muted signals of the book's content.
Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Wil-
liams are not, nor are they meant to be, "fully-
rounded" characters such as we can expect in realis-
tic fiction; they are the shards of life, glimpsed for
a moment, the debris of suffering and defeat.  In
each story one of them emerges, shyly or with a
false assertiveness, trying to reach out to compan-
ionship and love, driven almost mad by the search
for human connection.  In the economy of Winesburg
these grotesques matter less in their own right than
as agents or symptoms of that "indefinable hunger"
for meaning which is Anderson's preoccupation.

Brushing against one another, passing one an-
other in the streets or the fields, they see bodies and
hear voices, but it does not really matter--they are
disconnected, psychically lost.  Is this due to the par-
ticular circumstances of small-town America as An-
derson saw it at the turn of the century? Or does
he feel that he is sketching an inescapable human
condition which makes all of us bear the burden of
loneliness? Alice Hindman in the story "Adventure"
turns her face to the wall and tries "to force herself
to face the fact that many people must live and die
alone, even in Winesburg." Or especially in Wines-
burg? Such impressions have been put in more gen-
eral terms in Anderson's only successful novel, Poor
White:

All men lead their lives behind a wall of misun-

derstanding they have themselves built, and

most men die in silence and unnoticed behind

the walls.  Now and then a man, cut off from

his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, be-

comes absorbed in doing something that is per-

sonal, useful and beautiful.  Word of his activities

is carried over the walls.

These "walls" of misunderstanding are only sel-
dom due to physical deformities (Wing Biddlebaum
in "Hands") or oppressive social arrangements (Kate
Swift in "The Teacher.") Misunderstanding, loneli-
ness, the inability to articulate, are all seen by An-
derson as virtually a root condition, something
deeply set in our natures.  Nor are these people, the
grotesques, simply to be pitied and dismissed; at
some point in their lives they have known desire,
have dreamt of ambition, have hoped for friendship.
In all of them there was once something sweet, "like
the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards in
Winesburg." Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at
some rigid notion or idea, a "truth" which turns
out to bear the stamp of monomania, leaving them
helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out but un-
able to.  Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescap-
able to life, and it does so with a deep fraternal
sadness, a sympathy casting a mild glow over the
entire book.  "Words," as the American writer Paula
Fox has said, "are nets through which all truth es-
capes." Yet what do we have but words?

They want, these Winesburg grotesques*, to unpack
their hearts, to release emotions buried and fes-
tering.  Wash Williams tries to explain his eccentricity
but hardly can; Louise Bentley "tried to talk but
could say nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a
fantasy world, inventing "his own people to whom
he could really talk and to whom he explained the
things he had been unable to explain to living
people."

In his own somber way, Anderson has here
touched upon one of the great themes of American
literature, especially Midwestern literature, in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the
struggle for speech as it entails a search for the self.
Perhaps the central Winesburg story, tracing the
basic movements of the book, is "Paper Pills," in
which the old Doctor Reefy sits "in his empty office
close by a window that was covered with cobwebs,"
writes down some thoughts on slips of paper ("pyr-
amids of truth," he calls them) and then stuffs them
into his pockets where they "become round hard
balls" soon to be discarded.  What Dr. Reefy's
"truths" may be we never know; Anderson simply
persuades us that to this lonely old man they are
utterly precious and thereby incommunicable, forming
a kind of blurred moral signature.

After a time the attentive reader will notice in
these stories a recurrent pattern of theme and inci-
dent: the grotesques, gathering up a little courage,
venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in
the dark, there to establish some initiatory relation-
ship with George Willard, the young reporter who
hasn't yet lived long enough to become a grotesque.
Hesitantly, fearfully, or with a sputtering incoherent
rage, they approach him, pleading that he listen to
their stories in the hope that perhaps they can find
some sort of renewal in his youthful voice.  Upon
this sensitive and fragile boy they pour out their
desires and frustrations.  Dr. Parcival hopes that
George Willard "will write the book I may never get
written," and for Enoch Robinson, the boy repre-
sents "the youthful sadness, young man's sadness,
the sadness of a growing boy in a village at the
year's end [which may open] the lips of the old
man."

What the grotesques really need is each other, but
their estrangement is so extreme they cannot estab-
lish direct ties--they can only hope for connection
through George Willard.  The burden this places on
the boy is more than he can bear.  He listens to them
attentively, he is sympathetic to their complaints,
but finally he is too absorbed in his own dreams.
The grotesques turn to him because he seems "dif-
ferent"--younger, more open, not yet hardened--
but it is precisely this "difference" that keeps him
from responding as warmly as they want.  It is
hardly the boy's fault; it is simply in the nature of
things.  For George Willard, the grotesques form a
moment in his education; for the grotesques, their
encounters with George Willard come to seem like
a stamp of hopelessness.

The prose Anderson employs in telling these sto-
ries may seem at first glance to be simple: short sen-
tences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax.
In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in
which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest
Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the
base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an econ-
omy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary
speech or even oral narration.  What Anderson em-