Today's Open Road Freebie
Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
- At BN.com
- Not currently free at Amazon.com
Overview:
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, a cycle of short stories concerning life in a small Ohio town at the end of the nineteenth century.
At the centre is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the confidant of the town's 'grotesques' -- solitary figures unable to communicate with others. George is their conduit for expression and solace from loneliness, but he has his own longings which eventually draw him away from home to seek a career in the city. He carries with him the dreams and unuttered words of remarkable characters such as Wing Biddlebaum, the disgraced former teacher, and the story-telling Doctor Parcival.
In the perfectly imagined world of an archetypal small American town, Anderson reveals the hidden passions that turn ordinary lives into fonts of unforgettable emotions. Played out against the deceptively placid backdrop of Winesburg, Anderson's loosely connected stories coalesce, like chapters, into a powerful novel of love and loss.