“These notes make no pretense of being a record of fact. That isn’t their object. They are merely notes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas that have floated through the mind of one present-day American…It is my aim to be true to the essence of things. That’s what I’m after.”

Told through many notes in four books and an epilogue, Sherwood Anderson’s memoir of Midwestern life and culture journeys through the author’s own imaginative world and through the world of facts. From Anderson’s childhood to his attempt to ingratiate himself with New York’s literary elite, A Story Teller’s Story is a unique look into the psyche of an American icon.

Sherwood Anderson’s most enduring work, Winesburg, Ohio, is considered one of earliest works of modernist literature. The sequence of short stories centers on the life of George Willard and those who live in the rural, pre-industrial town. “Adventure,” a short story within the novel, tells the tale of Alice Hindman, a twenty-something girl, and her continued devotion to her former lover Ned Currie, who left her to seek his fortune in Chicago. A story of self-discovery and heartache, “Adventure” is representative of why Winesburg, Ohio is considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century.

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Hugh McVey is an inventor who moves from Missouri to Bidwell, Ohio. He creates a mechanical cabbage planter to ease the workload of farmers, but an investor exploits his product. His next invention, a corn cutter, makes him a fortune and transforms the small town in Ohio into a center of manufacturing. McVey, lonely and ruminative, meets Clara Butterworth, who attends Ohio State. Published one year after the short story collection Winesburg, Ohio, this novel has a modernist style and a realist attention to everyday life, and holds a significant amount of contemporary resonance.

The Triumph of the Egg is a fictional panorama of a great region of our country, unfolded by a writer who—to quote the New York Times—“depicts life in the Midwest as Dostoevsky pictured the many colored life of Russia, with almost as wonderful a touch of genius, with a more concentrated and daring skill.”

This coveted 1921 collection is an example of what a book of stories can be when a writer of vision deals with the materials of American life.

Winesburg, Ohio is a little-known masterpiece that forever changed the course of American storytelling. Bittersweet and richly insightful, it reveals Sherwood Anderson’s special talent for taking the small moments of life and transforming them into timeless folk tales-a talent that inspired a generation of writers including William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. At the center of this collection of stories stands George Willard, an earnest young reporter for the Winesburg Eagle who sets out to gather the town’s daily news. He ends up discovering the town’s deepest secrets as one by one, the townsfolk confide their hopes, dreams, and fears to the reporter. In their recollections of first loves and last rites, of sprawling farms and winding country roads, the town rises vividly-and poignantly-to life. With polished prose and fresh imagery, Winesburg, Ohio is an American classic that celebrates small town life in the lost days of innocence and good will.

This timeless collection charted a new stylistic path for modern fiction. Through twenty-two connected short stories, Sherwood Anderson looks into the lives of the inhabitants of a small town in the American heartland. These psychological portraits of the sensitive and imaginative of Winesburg’s population are seen through the eyes of a young reporter-narrator, George Willard. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon. With its simple and intense style, Winesburg, Ohio evokes the quiet moments of epiphany in the lives of ordinary men and women.

Though its reputation once suffered, Winesburg, Ohio is now considered one of the most influential portraits of pre-industrial small-town life in the United States. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked it twenty-fourth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and it continues to be read widely both in and out of classrooms around the country.

Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of stories set in a fictitious town in the 1890s, has long been considered Sherwood Anderson’s masterpiece. This groundbreaking work set the stage for a new era in writing, greatly influencing Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck, among many others. Anderson wrote simply, brilliantly crafting a work that dared to examine the darker impulses of human nature. Considered by many at the time of publication in 1919 to be a scandalous work, Winesburg, Ohio has nonetheless survived through the decades as one of the forerunners of modern fiction. Haunting and powerful, it draws listeners into the streets and houses of Winesburg–and into the darkly complex lives of each of Anderson’s unforgettable “grotesques.”

Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson’s masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small town at the end of the nineteenth century. In the perfectly imagined world of Winesburg, an archetypal small American town, Anderson reveals the hidden passions that turn ordinary lives into fonts of unforgettable emotions. Played out against a deceptively placid backdrop, Anderson’s loosely connected stories coalesce, like chapters, into a powerful novel of love and loss.