INTRODUCTION
by Irving Howe
I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I
first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio. Gripped by these stories and sketches
of Sherwood Anderson\'s small-town "grotesques," I felt that he was
opening for me new depths of experience, touching upon half-buried
truths which nothing in my young life had prepared me for. A New York
City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent time in the small towns
that lay sprinkled across America, I found myself overwhelmed by the
scenes of wasted life, wasted love--was this the "real" America?--that
Anderson sketched in Winesburg. In those days only one other book
seemed to offer so powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy\'s
Jude the Obscure.
Several years later, as I was about to go overseas as a soldier, I spent
my last weekend pass on a somewhat quixotic journey to Clyde, Ohio, the
town upon which Winesburg was partly modeled. Clyde looked, I suppose,
not very different from most other American towns, and the few of its
residents I tried to engage in talk about Anderson seemed quite
uninterested. This indifference would not have surprised him; it certainly
should not surprise any- one who reads his book.