‘Losing Often and Publicly’: On Winesburg, Ohio

The New Republic (25 June 1919)

Every Middle Westerner will recognize Winesburg, Ohio as the town in which he grew up. Devon, Iowa, would have furnished forth just such a book as this … or any one of ten thousand others. The story of a small town anywhere is the story of the revolt of youth against custom-morality; with youth winning only occasionally and in secret, losing often and publicly. In the middle west the dominant morality of the crossroads is puritan inheritance. Puritanism went over to Ohio from New England with the settlers, and has taken a firmer hold on the minds and the lives of the inhabitants of the Mississippi valley than it ever had in the east … As a challenge to the snappy short story form, with its planned proportions of flippant philosophy, epigrammatic conversation and sex danger, nothing better has come out of America than Winesburg, Ohio.

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James Maxwell Anderson (1888 – 1959) was an playwright, author, poet, and journalist from Pennsylvania.