by Irving Howe
I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I first chancedupon Winesburg, Ohio. Gripped by these stories and sketches of SherwoodAnderson’s small-town “grotesques,” I felt that he wasopening for me new depths of experience, touching upon half-buried truths whichnothing in my young life had prepared me for. A New York City boy who never sawthe crops grow or spent time in the small towns that lay sprinkled acrossAmerica, I found myself overwhelmed by the scenes of wasted life, wastedlove—was this the “real” America?—that Andersonsketched in Winesburg. In those days only one other book seemed to offer sopowerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.
Several years later, as I was about to go overseas as a soldier, I spent mylast week-end pass on a somewhat quixotic journey to Clyde, Ohio, the town