In the Library
Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson, 1919
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 22
- Length
- Length 71k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Dubliners
James Joyce
Dubliners does the same thing, but for Ireland's capital instead of an Ohio village, using linked stories and sudden epiphanies to expose lives quietly closing in on themselves.
£1.99
Main Street
Sinclair Lewis
Main Street does the same thing, but through one restless woman who cannot make her small Midwestern town's narrowness feel like enough of a life.
£1.99
About the book
At the bottom of the apple barrel, past the pickers' reach, hang the twisted apples: gnarled, misshapen, and startlingly sweet if you bite into one. Sherwood Anderson builds his whole book from that apple. Winesburg, Ohio gathers the grotesques of one small Ohio town, ordinary people bent out of true by a single truth they seized and would not let go of. Wing Biddlebaum's gentle, restless hands once made him a beloved teacher, until a lie drove him out of another town and taught him to keep them hidden in his pockets for the rest of his life. Alice Hindman waits years for a man who left for the city and is never coming back, until one rain-soaked night she runs naked into the dark and calls out to a stranger in the street. George Willard, the town's young reporter, is the one they all confess to, story after story, until on the last page he boards a train and watches Winesburg shrink behind the glass, already turning into the only subject he will ever need to write.