Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson · 1876–1941 · USA

Why it matters

Interlinked stories of a small Ohio town's lonely, warped 'grotesques,' loosely tied together by a young reporter desperate to escape them. Its plain, elliptical sentences broke from Victorian ornament and taught Hemingway and Faulkner how loneliness actually sounds on the page.

At a glance

Plain, accessible prose, though its elliptical, unresolved endings reward close reading.