Born in 1876, Sherwood Anderson grew up in a small town in Ohio - an experience that was the basis of his greatest achievements as a writer. He served in the Spanish-American War, worked as an advertising man, and managed an Ohio paint factory before abandoning both job and family to embark on a literary career in Chicago. His first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, was published in 1916; his second, Marching Men, a characteristic study of the individual in conflict with industrial society, appeared in 1917. But it is Winesburg, Ohio (1919), with its disillusioned view of small-town lives, that is generally considered his masterpiece. Later novels - Poor White, Many Marriages, and Dark Laughter - continued to depict the spiritual poverty of the machine age. Anderson died in 1941.

This timeless cycle of short stories lays bare the life of a small town in the American Midwest. The central character is George Willard, a young reporter on the Winesburg Eagle to whom, one by one, the town's inhabitans confide their hopes, their dreams, and their fears. The town of friendly but solitary people comes to life as Anderson's special talent exposes the emotional undercurrents that bind its people together. Malcolm Cowley's introduction is a penetrating reappraisal of "the only storyteller of his generation who left a mark on the style and vision of the generation that followed...Hemingway, Faulker, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Saroyan, and Henry Miller...each owes an unmistakable debt to Anderson."