{"product_id":"2940016323725","title":"Winesburg, Ohio","description":"\"Winesburg, Ohio,\" author, Sherwood Anderson's impulse is positive, is a will to perform and not a refusal to compromise. And yet \"uncompromising\" is likely to be the word in the reader's mind as he reads these chronicles. A kind of prose \"Spoon River\" commentary, probing beneath the surface of American small town life for its real substance ... or rather probing beneath the small town life for the individual lives and consciousnesses of its friends and fellow-citizens. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Winesburg, Ohio,\" is as disconcerting as \"Spoon River\" was, because we see it for the first time without its mask of official decorum. Physically, as a place, we recognize it to the least item. The map (before the first story) gives merely the landmarks of that topography with which we become intimate. Kate Swift's walk of a winter night becomes our walk to the last inch: \"First she went to the end of her own street and then across a pair of hay scales set in the ground before a feed barn and into Trunion Pike. Along Trunion Pike she went to Ned Winter's barn and turning east followed a street of low frame houses that led over Gospel Hill and into Sucker Road that ran down a shallow valley past Ike Smead's chicken farm to Waterworks Pond ...\" and so on. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is our town; we are there with the fading schoolma'am, know what drives her towards young George Willard, and what, that same night, heals, through her passion, the Reverend Curtis Hartman of his soul's sickness. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese tales, or sketches, are linked, like the Spoon River numbers, by cross-allusion and the repeated appearance, in foreground or background, of the same persons. Young Willard is, in no very brilliant way, the central figure—the lad of somewhat more than ordinary ability and imagination who is among the few destined actually to escape from Winesburg and to try conclusions with fate on more open ground. With his departure our curtain falls. We board the train with him and drift away from the town of Winesburg, perhaps\u003cbr\u003eforever. \"His life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of manhood.\" There is much of \"sex\" in this book, and it would not have been judged a book for the \"young person,\" when there was such a thing. But it is a book which that quaint creature's enlightened successor might well read as a caustic offset against the elaborate prurience of the current magazines—or even for that breath of sturdy Scottish idealism which animates it, by way of offset against the mental and moral smudginess of a Russian using a microscope, the shrugging cynicism of a Frenchman applying the scalpel, and eke the Teutonic sentimentalism of a Dreiser sawing wood.","brand":"OGB","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47066803306736,"sku":"2940016323725","price":4.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940016323725_p0.jpg?v=1763634065","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940016323725","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}