SOURCE: White, Ray Lewis. “The Grotesques.” In Winesburg, Ohio: An Exploration, pp. 56-94. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1990.

In the following essay, White examines Anderson's depiction of the grotesque in the physical, psychological, and sexual propensities of his characters.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio presents an interesting description and dramatization of a typical midwestern American town in the 1890s, complete with the citizens and the institutions associated with such places. It can also be read pleasurably as the description and dramatization of a youth's initiation or growing toward adult understanding in a typical midwestern American town in the 1890s. But neither of these approaches sufficiently explains the greatness of Anderson's achievement in Winesburg, Ohio—why readers since 1919 have read the book with a new sense of the power of writing. For Anderson captures in words the most elusive and the most buried of human impulses and motivations; in short...