Winesburg, Ohio

By: Sherwood Anderson

Narrated by: George Guidall

Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

Public Domain (P)1995 Recorded Books, LLC

The beginning of the American short story cycle

A beautiful (though melancholic) journey through small-town middle America. While set in the early 1900s, George Willard's complex relationship with his hometown and ultimate path to adulthood still resonates.

Winesburg, Ohio

This one is different but I liked it. We were told about many different peoples lives in a town through one of the occupants eyes.

Stories of LongingDisappointments, the Human Condition and Aspirations

This is an affecting book. It took me a short while to get used to the narrator, but I really enjoyed both the writer and the narrator.

Pieces of You - Probably Better in Print

I wanted to like 'Winesburg', but this book is probably better in print.

- There are zero seconds between chapters. That doesn't sound like a huge deal, but I promise: it gets annoying fast, and seriously takes away from your internalization of what you just read.
- I'm not a fan of Guidall's narration for this title. With all the different characters and disjoint scenes, the stories feel like one homogeneous blur. And it shouldn't.

'Winesburg' presents some great unspoken honesty into the human condition. Some of the scenes are real gems: the priest/Kate Swift/George Willard sequence, the married men in the cornfield, the final chapters with Helen and George. Perhaps this title will grow on me with time. If I read it again, it will be after a trip to the library/bookstore.

Plot didn’t age well…

The performance was great. The story not so much… I know I know! It’s a classic. But I feel that the plot has not aged well. The lives of the various characters are less than relatable.
I will say however; the first segment, the prologue, is remarkable, poetic, and truly Individual. I had not read (or rather, listened) to prose put forth in this way before.
I give it 3 stars.
-Noah Balfour

An unusual, mannered performance -- but brilliant

Though it may outwardly resemble Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A., the rural town of Winesburg, in this famous collection of related short stories, is far from quaint and pastoral; rather, it's a hotbed of thwarted dreams, stifled passions, and suicidal loneliness. Anderson couldn't write explicitly about sex in those days, but it's a central element in many of the lives he examines, most of them tragic. There's so much misery in this community, so many painful or twisted emotions bubbling beneath the proper surface of daily life, that the stories seem at times almost self-parodies. (The style invites parody and has indeed been parodied.)

What sets this audiobook apart is the amazing performance that George Guidall gives. All I can say is that his reading is extremely unusual, extremely mannered, all the more so if you try listening to it, as I did, played at half speed. His delivery is somber and portentous, emphasizing every single word, and every single sentence somehow reads like a death sentence, ending on a somber, despairing note. I don't know how Anderson would have felt about it, but I think it's a brilliant performance that brings out the best in the stories.

“Everyone in the world is Christ”

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) links twenty-two stories about American small town eccentrics (“grotesques”) that together depict life in the early 20th-century industrial and material modern era.

The story subjects are mostly sad and lonely people who feel like outcasts cut off from society. Sometimes they leave Winesburg for a big city; sometimes they return to Winesburg from a big city. Their mild and bland exteriors often conceal great, undefinable passions: “She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on.” Usually they fail to find fulfillment because they are not quite sure what they want from life, e.g., “I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.”

The grotesques are farmers, storekeepers, daughters, wives, doctors, farm hands, school teachers, telegraph operators, berry pickers, ministers, and so on. They are young or old or both. They are often female. (Anderson writes about a greater range of protagonists than, say, Charles Bukowski.) One finishes the book feeling that one knows all the grotesques in town and is ready to appreciate the grotesques in the real world now.

Mind you, Anderson is NOT only saying, “Look at these quirky grotesques—aren’t they quaint and funny and pathetic!” He’s saying, “everybody suffers,” and “everyone is crucified.”

George Willard, the teenaged Winesburg Eagle reporter with an interest in odd people, becomes an eye witness or listener for many of the stories’ climaxes, which often concern “adventures,” intense moments that change the lives of the people who experience them.

The stories can be quite moving or quite funny (the sequence depicting Joe Welling coaching the local baseball club is priceless). My favorites are:

“Hands,” about a gentle and passionate loner born to be a teacher but living alone and isolated due to his inability to control his hands: he tells George Willard “be yourself and dream.”

The four-chapter novella “Godliness,” in which local farmer Jesse Bentley should have been born in the Old Testament era and believes he’s the true instrument of God, destined to lead humanity into a new era. Thus, he needs a son and a sign from God, but his delicate wife dies after bearing a daughter, who never feels loved. Jesse continues thriving, buying up area farms and making money, till his twelve-year-old grandson, David, comes to live with him, and he decides to sacrifice a lamb to make a man of God of the boy.

“A Man of Ideas,” about the usually well-mannered Standard Oil agent Joe Welling, who’s like a volcano, subject to fits of absurd idea spewing, such that men watch him with “amusement and alarm,” never knowing when he might suddenly corner them and unload a series of “interesting” ideas. When he starts dating the sister of a VERY scary guy, the story becomes reminiscent of Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.”

“Adventure,” about a lonely twenty-seven-year old woman wanting to be loved.

“Tandy,” in which an alcoholic stranger recognizes in the seven-year-old daughter of the town agnostic the strength to be loved and to love and that this quality has a name, Tandy, but that either she or he has been born in the wrong time.

“The Teacher,” about Kate Smith, who is usually cold and severe but sometimes playfully imaginative with her students, and who recognizes what she takes to be incohate writerly genius in George Willard, which interest he may misinterpret.

“Queer,” in which an unhappy, eccentric young man hates that his parents are said to be “queer,” but the more he tries to demonstrate to George Willard that he is normal, the queerer he becomes.

“Death,” about an aborted romance between an awkward middle-aged doctor and a tired, gaunt old married woman of forty-one, both sensing in the other a similar inexpressible longing: “The dear, the poor dear.”

“Sophistication,” in which George Willard and the town banker’s daughter talk, touch, laugh, and play together like little animals, young things in a young world, which “is what makes existence in the modern world possible.”

Anderson writes some great descriptions:

“The land becomes a wide green billiard table on which tiny human insects toil up and down.”

“In his grief Tom Willard’s face looked like the face of a little dog that has been out a long time in bitter weather.”

“By the window the two stood, the tall awkward boy-man and the little wrinkled man-boy.”

And in moments like the following, he evokes a pathetic and numinous vision:

“A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.”

I like Anderson’s sympathy for and interest in small town “grotesques.” And he writes about them with a vivid, concise, simple, and potent prose.

George Guidall is a great audiobook reader and pitch-perfect here, but immediately after the end of a story the next one starts without any pause, so it’s disconcerting and easy to miss that a new story is beginning.

Better read than heard?

This early 20th century American classic was read with wonderful nuance by George Guidall, but the editing destroyed it. I think this one is better read, at least for the first time. The poignancy of the stories is lost by the abruptness of chapter shifting. A beautifully written masterpiece of American life in all its struggles, hopes, and failimgs.

Another destination resolved

I was not familiar with this work before making the commitment to consume all Top 100 picks from the New York Times Modern Library but found it an interesting selection.

Set in a small Midwest town at the Turn of the 20th Century and published in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio is sculpted as a series of vignettes about various people in the town commonly linked to George Willard, sole reporter of the Winesburg Eagle. Though there is an actual Winesburg, the town presented actually bears a closer resemblance to the author's home town of Clyde, OH.

Each of the short stories ultimately weave into George's story as he wrestles with his instincts to stay in a small town where he feels emotionally and psychologically abandoned even though he has always resided in his mother's boarding house.

It has been variously adapted for film and stage but I have seen none and, to be frank, won't likely actively seek out. Like some of the other selections in the Modern Library Top 100, such as Sons and Lovers and To The Lighthouse, the work didn't engage me as I had hoped though critically acclaimed by the likes of Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, Henry Miller and Philip Roth. Perhaps I'll give her another go down the road.

On a personal note, this is my 40th book completed for the year. I will say that the ending is lovely for both the book and for me as we are where we hoped to be at the end of our respective literary sojourns.

No Time Between Chapters

Gives NO time between chapters. kinda frustrating. Because plot is similar from story to story, as are names you sometimes don't know when a new story starts. Normally this wouldn't be an issue but due to the nature of the story's somewhat ambiguous beginnings and endings the lack of clarity between chapters is difficult while purely listening.