Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio Summary | The Book of the Grotesque Summary

Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson's collage of life in a small Ohio town, exploring human motivation and communication. Episodic in nature, Winesburg, Ohio falls in between a collection of short stories and a novel. The twenty-two named sections, one broken into four sub-sections, follow different characters in the same town. Many of their lives are connected through George Willard, a young writer who witnesses his townsfolk's stories and must ultimately leave Winesburg to pursue his own life's journey. On a deeper level, their lives are connected through a drive for human connection that often is impossible to fulfill.

The first section describes an unnamed writer. A carpenter comes to make the writer's bed level with the window, so that he can look out it. The two talk, and the writer leads the carpenter to speak of the carpenter's time spent in a prison during a war. His brother died of starvation. The carpenter cries as he speaks of it, a grotesque sight. The project is eventually done, but the writer cannot get into his bed without climbing on a chair. The carpenter's story, drawn out of him by the writer, overshadowed the carpenter's job.

Afterwards, the writer lies in his bed, thinking about how he is going to die. He is a heavy smoker and worries about his heart. The idea of death makes him more alive, and he feels young inside, as if he has something young and brilliant inside of him. He dreams of all the people he has known during his life, the "grotesques." Not all the grotesques are horrible, but some are amusing or almost beautiful. When he awakes, he painfully gets out of bed and begins to write about these people. The result is a book called The Book of the Grotesque, which does not get published. However, the narrator reads it, and it leaves an impression on him. The book talks about people's personal truths, many types of beautiful truths about virginity or passion or wealth or poverty, which people take inside of themselves and which make them grotesques. The narrator notes that he mentions the carpenter only because he, a common person, is the only nearly understandable and lovable person in the old man's book.