"The Book of the Grotesque” and Winesburg, Ohio

Abstract

Sherwood Anderson’s representative work Winesburg, Ohio portrays a procession of grotesque characters in the background of looming industrialism into the picaresque rural American small town. Its first story “The Book of the Grotesque” is not a separate story like others but serves a general prologue, intending to plant the concept of grotesque in the reader’s mind. Along with this, it links to the overall design of subsequent stories, with the old writer corresponding to George Willard, the carpenter to those grotesques, and the old writer’s bedroom to the grotesques’ entrapment of mentality.