A Study Guide for Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535843140

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Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson

1919

Introduction

Winesburg, Ohio was Sherwood Anderson's break-through work, the one that first gained widespread attention for him as an artist, although it was years before he would produce a best seller. He was fortytwo when it was published, with two novels published previously that had received little interest from the reading public.

According to the story that Anderson would later relate in his Memoirs, the book started one night when he was living by himself in a run-down rooming house in Chicago, in 1915: it was a place full of would-be artists, and Anderson, who was supporting himself by writing advertising copy, sat down one December evening and, almost miraculously, produced the story Hands in one sitting. In the version he often told, the story came out exactly as he wanted it and he never changed a word, although researchers have since turned up drafts that show substantial differences.

Having found his style in this one inspired flash, he went on to develop the other stories that make up Winesburg, Ohio over the next few years. When the book was published in 1919, it did not sell very well, but the critical response marked the author as a man of talent and artistic integrity. Some critics lambasted it for being immoral because of its sexual themes, both hidden and blatant, such as the child molestation charge in Hands or the implied impotency in Respectability.

For each critic put off by the buried subjects, though, there were two or three who appreciated Anderson's courage in examining areas previously untouched by mainstream writers. Anderson's greatest influence on American literature has been indirect, in the ways that Winesburg, Ohio inspired the following generation of post-World War I writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and John Steinbeck. It was when these writers began speaking of the debt they owed to Sherwood Anderson that the book stopped being just a favorite of writers and gathered mass attention from the public.

Author Biography

Sherwood Anderson was born in 1876 in Camden, Ohio. In 1884 his family moved to Clyde, the small Ohio town that Winesburg is patterned after. After his mother's death in 1896, he moved to Chicago. He hoped to find better opportunities in the big city, but was unable to find any employment except menial, back-breaking labor; discouraged, he joined the army two years later, serving in the Spanish-American War.

After the war he finished his high school degree in Ohio and, invigorated by travel and education, he moved to Chicago again in 1900. He found employment working in the new field of advertising. In 1907, after marrying a wealthy manufacturer's daughter, he moved to Elyria, Ohio, as president of the Anderson Manufacturing Company. For five years he struggled to keep his business afloat, writing a few poems and some short stories that were of no interest to anyone until later, when he became famous.

What followed has become one