AREAS OF CONSIDERABLE PSYCHIC MURKINESS AND ODDITY—WINESBURG, OHIO.

AREAS OF CONSIDERABLE PSYCHIC MURKINESS AND ODDITY—WINESBURG, OHIO. Sherwood Anderson’s WINESBURG, OHIO was a set of interrelated short stories which was published in 1919. The stories are set in a small town in the Midwest around 1900, but not an idyllic small town. The stories deal with the lives of the “grotesques” [Anderson’s word] in the town. It seems to have been scandalous. Anderson said that when the reviews appeared, “I found that…it was being taken as the work of a perverted mind.” Irving Howe wrote in 1951: “If read as social fiction Winesburg is somewhat absurd, for no such town could possibly exist. If read as a venture into abnormal psychology the book seems almost lurid, for within its total structure the behavior of its hysterics and paranoids is quite purposeless….” I had marked these comments when I read WINESBURG recently (and liked it a lot). I had never read it before because my father was so cheerfully dismissive of it: it was supposed to be shocking, but everybody knew all that. His reaction to WINESBURG had been like his reaction to WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP. To paraphrase, there is considerable murkiness and oddity everywhere.