Trilling charged Anderson with in- dulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotional meandering in stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling’s influential essay attacking Anderson, an at- tack from which Anderson’s reputation would never quite recover. Once freed from the army, I started to write liter- ary criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biog- raphy of Anderson. This indifference would not have surprised him it certainly should not surprise any- one who reads his book. Clyde looked, I suppose, not very different from most other American towns, and the few of its residents I tried to engage in talk about Anderson seemed quite uninterested. Several years later, as I was about to go overseas as a soldier, I spent my last weekend pass on a somewhat quixotic journey to Clyde, Ohio, the town upon which Winesburg was partly modeled.

In those days only one other book seemed to offer so powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. A New York City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent time in the small towns that lay sprinkled across America, I found myself overwhelmed by the scenes of wasted life, wasted love–was this the “real” America?–that Anderson sketched in Winesburg. Gripped by these stories and sketches of Sherwood Anderson’s small-town “grotesques,” I felt that he was opening for me new depths of experience, touching upon half-buried truths which nothing in my young life had prepared me for.

I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio. II, also concerning Jesse Bentley III Surrender, concerning Louise Bentley IV Terror, concerning David Hardy THE PHILOSOPHER, concerning Doctor Parcival

The egg by sherwood anderson summary