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Summary: Great stories of the grotesque!
Review: I enjoyed the book for the character insight, but I fail to classify these loosely connected stories as a great novel. This book is great for a group discussion.
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Summary: To make it a better place, to make it a better world
Review: Sherwood Anderson's best work, Winesburg, Ohio is quite interesting to read. If you begin reading novels, it is definitely a good reading material. All characters can be described as Twisted Apples, used in "Paper Pills". Even though they are twisted and gnarled apples, they have all of the sweetness. It seems that Anderson try to tell us what matters in social relationship is mutual understanding. Everybody has a right to be respected regardless of any mental or physical imperfection.
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Summary: The power of a great story
Review: Actually, I guess in this case, we're talking about twenty or so great stories.I'm reading Winesburg for the second time, and I'm realizing something: This work is standing the test of time because of its strength in the story. Each of these chapters are packed with such unique and interesting ideas, plot, characters, etc., that you just can't put it down. Winesburg has both weirdness and heart, two of the most important traits in any work of fiction.
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Summary: The beauty, the sadness, the solitude - small-town America
Review: I read this book every 10 years - I use it as a yardstick to measure my changing appreciation of American life. But even I must dispute the Modern Library, putting it on a list of great novels - after all, it's a book of short stories, not a novel.
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Summary: Haunting and unforgettalbe.
Review: It has been well over 10 years since I first read this book and yet the story is still with me. It is haunting in its realism and profundity and unforgettable in the lives it reveals. Beautiful! One of my all-time favourite books!
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Summary: Winesburg, amazing
Review: I am only 17 years old, but I've read a lot of books. I want to tell everybody out there that Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson is, by far, the best I've read so far. We were required to read it for an advanced english class and every student in the class was "wowed" by the depth of Anderson's book. I strongly recomend this book for any high school, or college, class; or book club. I feel that the only way to read this book is in a group so each chapter can be discussed and studied. This is not a book for those looking for an easy-reader. This is for those of you who will catch the small things (Who's a grotesque? Who's not? Are they twisted apples? Note the motifs of hands, light and dark, adventure. In which chapters are there allusion to greek myths? To The Bible?) I strongly recomend this book to anyone who has lost faith in the thoughfullness of writers today. The book will wow you, but only if you can figure it out.
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Summary: Haunting tales of loneliness and alienation.
Review: I suspect this book shocked contemporary audiences. The chapters are stories about alienated, unhappy, often lonely characters living in a small town. The characters have their vagaries and flaws, but also their desires, dreams, lusts, disappointments. Under the small-town veneer is as much per capita sadness and dysfunction as any big city contains
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Summary: Winesburgers
Review: Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" is a string of twenty-one connected stories (plus an introduction) that, like James Joyce's "Dubliners", links a community of people to a single place and time and explores common themes. Most of the stories are told from the vista of the recurring central character George Willard, the local newspaper reporter and a sort of alter ego of Anderson, who used his own rural hometown of Clyde, Ohio, as a model for Winesburg. Rather than an idyllic portrayal of American small town life in the 1890's, these stories are about psychological isolation, loneliness, and sexual repression and frustration brought about by small town mores. These people are as sad and neurotic as any that might be found living in the big cities. Anderson calls them "grotesques," people who are warped by the sanctimoniousness of provincial piety and their own inhibitions. His nonchalant, ironic way of writing understates the peculiarity and the gloominess of the stories. The stories are loaded with symbolism that is difficult to decipher. My favorite is probably the four-part "Godliness", which, in a satire of religious fervor, merges parodies of the biblical tales of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac and David's slaying of Goliath. But all the stories have interesting allusions of various degrees of subtlety. This work must have seemed quite groundbreaking in its depth, complexity, and boldness when it was first published in 1919.
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Summary: Not bad....but a classic?
Review: I read this book as part of a course on 20th century American fiction. Now I realize I really don't know what small town Ohio was like in the early part of the 20th century, but surely it wasn't all like this. Every story/character was desperate and pathetic. Almost no characters had any redeeming features...except maybe the young reporter for the Winesburg paper. I thought some of the chapters were fantastic...like the chapter about the doctor, the young woman patient who became his wife and the balls of paper in his lab coat. But for the most part I found it depressing, hopeless, stiffling....and I am forever grateful that I don't live there.
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Summary: Inconsequential
Review: Take the simplicity of William Saroyan but omit the charm. Take the sparse imagery of Robert Frost but omit the poetry. Take the kaleidoscopic view of small town America of Edgar Lee Masters but omit the humanity. And there you have Anderson's Winesburg. There is no elegance in his style and no consequence in his narrative. He seeks to reveal Middle America with a series of vignettes but the result is a frustrating, meandering journey to Nowhere, Ohio.
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