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In 1919 a middle-aged Chicago advertising writer from Ohio, a failure as a businessman, husband, and father, published a slim yellow book of short stories intended to "reform" American literature. Sherwood Anderson strove to portray the buried inner lives of "pathetic grotesques" - people wounded by life in body or spirit - and to tell their stories in short revelations rather than in sweeping novels. Against all expectations, Winesburg Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life accomplished what its author intended. Afterwards, American literature would be written and read differently. Writers of short fiction learned from Anderson to achieve both character-centered form and daring Modernist subject matter. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, authorized by the Sherwood Anderson Literary Estate Trust, is an expert text, in that Ray Lewis White has consulted all Anderson manuscripts, typescripts, letters, diaries, and all editions of the book to present the masterpiece as it was intended. White's edition also is informed by his 35 years of experience in editing, studying, and appreciating Sherwood Anderson and his fiction. New to this edition of Winesburg, Ohio are historical and cultural annotations, documentation of changes of various editions, identification of the Ohio originals of Anderson's characters; and maps of the real town of Clyde, in North Central Ohio, which was the basis of Anderson's fictional account. Included as well are unique photographs of Anderson and Clyde that deepen knowledge and feeling for the author's time and his work.
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