Before Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Ford, there was Sherwood Anderson, who, with Winesburg, Ohio, charted a new direction in American fiction--evoking with lyrical simplicity quiet moments of epiphany in the lives of ordinary men and women. In a bed, elevated so that he can peer out the window, an old writer contemplates the fluttering of his heart and considers, as if viewing a pageant, the inhabitants of a small midwestern town. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon. "Nothing quite like it has ever been done in America," wrote H. L. Mencken. "It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own."

Published in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson'smasterpiece, a work in which he achieved the goal to whichhe believed all true writers should aspire: to see and feel "allof life within." In a perfectly imagined world, an archetypalsmall American town, he reveals the hidden passions thatturn ordinary lives into unforgettable ones. Unified by therecurring presence of young George Willard, and played outagainst the backdrop of Winesburg, Anderson's loosely connectedchapters, or stories, coalesce into a powerful novel.

In such tales as "Hands," the portrayal of a rural berrypicker still haunted by the accusations of homosexuality thatended his teaching career, Anderson's vision is as acutetoday as it was over eighty-five years ago. His intuitive abilityto home in on examples of timeless human conflicts--aworkingman deciding if he should marry the woman who isto bear his child, an unhappy housewife who seeks lovefrom the town's doctor, an unmarried high school teachersexually attracted to a pupil--makes this book not onlyimmensely readable but also deeply meaningful. An importantinfluence on Faulkner, Hemingway, and others who weredrawn to Anderson's innovative format and psychologicalinsights, Winesburg, Ohio deserves a place among the frontranks of our nation's finest literary achievements.

Introduction by JeffreyMeyers

THE TALES AND THE PERSONS

　The Book of the Grotesque

　HANDS--concerning Wing Biddlebaum

　PAPER PILLS--concerning Doctor Reefy

　MOTHER--concerning Elizabeth Willard

　THE PHILOSOPHER--conceming Doctor Parcival

　NOBODY KNows--concerning Louise Trunnion

　GODLINESS，a Tale in Four Parts

Ⅰ--concerning Jesse Bentley

　　Ⅱ—also concerning Jesse Bentley

　　Ⅲ Surrender--concerning Louise Bentley

　　Ⅳ Terror--concerning David Hardy

　A MAN OF IDEAS--concerning Joe Welling

　ADVENTURE--concerning Alice Hindman

 RESPECTABILITY--concerning Wash Williams

 THE THINKER--concerning Seth Richmond

 TANDY--concerning Tandy Hard

 THE STRENGTH OF GOD--concerning the

 Reverend Curtis Hartman

　THE TEACHER--concerning Kate Swift

　LONELINESS--concerning Enoch Robinson

　AN AWAKENING--concerning Belle Carpenter

　“QUEER”--concerning Elmer Cowley

　THE UNTOLD LIE--concerning Ray Pearson

　DRINK--concerning Tom Foster

　DEATH--concerning Doctor Reefy and Elizabeth Willard

　SOPHISTICATION--concerning Helen White

　DEPARTURE--concerning George Willard