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...