Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of 23 stories and character sketches by the American author Sherwood Anderson. The book was published in 1919. The collection explores the lives of the inhabitants of Winesburg, a fictional version of Clyde, Ohio, a small farm town where Anderson lived for about 12 years as a youth. The connecting link among the tales is a young newspaper reporter named George Willard. The book traces Willard’s growth as a person as he observes the people of the town.
The tales in Winesburg, Ohio made a significant break with the traditional American short story. Anderson became one of the first American writers to use modern psychological insights, especially those of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Instead of emphasizing plot and action, Anderson used a simple, precise, unsentimental style to reveal the frustration, loneliness, and longing in the lives of his characters. They tell stories of sterile lives and thwarted ambitions. They are stunted by the narrowness of Midwestern small-town life and by their own limitations.
