Reading Journal 2024: Winesburg, Ohio

Reading Journal 2024: Winesburg, Ohio
Author: Sherwood Anderson

Winesburg, Ohio could be described as; chronically melancholic, cynical, depressing. Those descriptives might be true, or at least partly true, but I think it would be a mistake to suggest that this is all the book is. As a collection of short stories that are bound together by the arc of a singular, reoccurring character (George Willard, a young journalist who works and writes for the local newspaper), Winesburg is a deeply immersive and honest portrait of the life of different people living in a small, unassuming, isolated, mundane, non-descript town.

The book is marked on the front end by a chapter titled Book of the Grotesque’, and ends with what I might suggest is one of the best final lines of a book I have ever encountered, if for the pure simplicity of its presence, bringing Willard’s particular part of the storyline to a fitting and poetic conclusion.

Speaking of the prose, while the nature of a short story collection is that some will inevitably be stronger and more interesting than others, which is true in this case, rarely did a page go by where I wasn’t highlighting memorable and quotable phrases, lines and sentences. It is described in the introduction as a “fetish for simplicity”, but that simplicity is profound, “seeking always to penetrate to thoughts uttermost end.”

Which makes his first chapter that much more fitting when he surmises, “in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.”

Beautiful even where it finds things like depression, loneliness, boredom, death, addiction, and unrealized longings. This is a book that doesn’t feel the need to mask over the truth of these realities, instead embracing them as part of what binds us together.

I’ve been accused of being melancholic, depressed, cynical myself, so I’m not surprised I found myself connecting with this, and even more so appreciating it. As one character proclaims in the chapter called Mother, “it seemed like a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.” Or as it described of Willard, “He is groping about trying to find himself. He is not a dull clod, all words and smartness. Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow.”

Don’t be surprised if this becomes your own response as well should you give this book a try. I couldn’t have put it better than what I found in this sentiment:
“I don’t know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think.”

I’ll leave it with this exceprt from the forward,
“It is essentially a literature of revolt against the great illusion of American civilization, the illusion of optimism, with all its childish evasion of harsh facts, its puerile cheerfulness, whose inevitable culmination is the school of “glad” books, which have reduced American literature to the lowest terms of sentimentality.”