Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

Wickedly parodied by Hemingway in his The Torrents of Spring and savaged by critical opinion, Sherwood Anderson's work fell from favour after his death and he has not yet been restored to his rightful place in American literature. Nonetheless, Winesburg, Ohio stands as his masterpiece. Its central character is the young reporter on the Winesburg Eagle to whom a spectrum of townsfolk confide their hopes, dreams and fears in a sequence of interrelated stories, a remarkable insight into the life of small-town America written from a viewpoint of profound disillusion.