Published in 1919, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio brought the small town to American readers in a form not seen before in our fiction. In what Edmund Wilson described as “a series of simple declarative sentences of almost primer-like baldness,” Anderson exposed the hidden struggles of ordinary people with little hope for redemption. His collection of linked stories made his name at forty-three. No other book of Anderson’s would fulfill as completely his considerable promise as a lyric, candid observer of American intimacies.

Anderson, an Ohioan, was born to small-town poverty in 1876. “I was myself a man outside the schools,” he commented, who felt that “writing, the telling of tales, had got too far away from life.” He didn’t earn a college degree, pursuing instead a tumultuous livelihood in business—among other things, he invented and marketed a “Cure for Roof Troubles,” called Roof-Fix. Anderson took up writing wholeheartedly only after bolting from his own manufacturing company and going to work as an advertising copywriter in Chicago. “Wallowing in boldness” with the would-be bohemians of the Chicago Renaissance, Anderson spoke for his cohorts when he wrote: “Anyway there we were, intellectually dominated by New England. We wanted to escape from it.” The stories of Winesburg, written in Chicago, were thus written as a rebuke.

Also written as a rebuke were many of Anderson’s later novels, essays, memoirs, reportage, prose poems, plays, and stories. He tried writing in virtually every genre, as if to prove to his naysayers