Winesburg, Ohio

An old writer lies in bed and watches everyone he has ever known march past, each of them turned into a grotesque. Then the book takes you to Winesburg, a farm town of eighteen hundred people, and shows you its grotesques one at a time: a man terrified of his own hands, a doctor who writes thoughts on scraps and throws them away, a minister who breaks a church window to spy on a woman, a farmer who tries to sacrifice a lamb to make God speak. Many of them end up talking to George Willard, the reporter for the town paper, who does not yet understand what he hears. By the last page he is on a train out of town, and you have met the people he leaves behind.

What happens in Winesburg, Ohio

An old writer, lying awake in a bed raised to the height of his window, watches a procession of everyone he has known. All of them have become grotesques, and he writes an unpublished book explaining why: each person seized one truth, tried to live by it, and so turned it into a falsehood. The tales that follow show the grotesques of Winesburg, Ohio, a farm town of about eighteen hundred people. Many of them confide in George Willard, the young reporter for the Winesburg Eagle. His mother Elizabeth, sick and disappointed, lives in the failing hotel her husband runs and prays that George will not become smart and successful but will express something for them both. Wing Biddlebaum hides the hands that once cost him his teaching job. Doctor Reefy writes thoughts on scraps of paper and rolls them into balls. Doctor Parcival tells George that everyone in the world is crucified. Jesse Bentley, sure that God has chosen him, frightens his grandson David into running away forever. Alice Hindman waits for a lover who never comes back. The minister Curtis Hartman spies on the teacher Kate Swift, who is trying in her own passionate way to teach George what a writer needs to know. Enoch Robinson loses the imaginary people who filled his room. Elmer Cowley, Ray Pearson and Tom Foster each struggle to explain themselves, and mostly fail. George, meanwhile, grows up by fits and starts. He boasts, chases girls, is knocked down by Ed Handby and beaten by Elmer Cowley, and misunderstands Kate Swift. When his mother dies, he sits with her body and feels something he cannot name, while the eight hundred dollars she kept hidden for his start in life stays behind the plaster of her wall. On the night of the county fair, he and Helen White sit together in the empty grandstand and find the understanding each wanted. One April morning George leaves Winesburg on the train for the city, and the town becomes the background for the dreams he hopes to live.

Where and when Winesburg, Ohio happens

Chapter by chapter summary + why it matters

1. 1

   The Book of the Grotesque, Hands, Paper Pills, Mother: One truth each

   An old writer imagines a procession of everyone he has known and writes a book arguing that people become grotesques when they take one truth as their own and live by it. In Hands, Wing Biddlebaum, driven out of a Pennsylvania school years before by a false accusation, forgets himself and touches George Willard’s shoulders, then flees in terror. In Paper Pills, Doctor Reefy scribbles thoughts on scraps he rolls into hard balls, and briefly marries a tall dark girl who came to him pregnant and frightened. In Mother, the sick Elizabeth Willard hears her husband urge George toward success, plans to stab him with her scissors, and then cannot show her joy when George says he wants to go away.

   Why it mattersThe prologue gives the book its key idea, and the first tales show it at work: each life is bent around one fear, habit or hope. They also introduce George as the person others turn to, and the unspoken bond between him and his mother.

2. 2

   The Philosopher, Nobody Knows: Bad lessons

   Doctor Parcival, a dirty doctor with few patients and plenty of money, seeks out George at the Eagle office and tells him strange stories about his brother, his mother and his father’s death in an asylum. After refusing to go to a child killed in a street accident, though no one even heard him refuse, he becomes sure the town will hang him and begs George to remember that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. In Nobody Knows, George answers a brief note from Louise Trunnion, meets her in the dark, and walks home telling himself that nobody knows.

   Why it mattersBoth tales show George learning from poor models: Parcival wants to fill him with contempt, and the night with Louise teaches him to take what he wants and hide it.

3. 3

   Godliness, Surrender, Terror: Jesse Bentley’s sign

   Jesse Bentley, the frail youngest son who takes over the family farm after his four brothers die in the Civil War, runs it with fanatical energy and cries out to God in the night for a son named David, like the Jesse of the Bible, but his wife Katherine dies giving birth to a daughter, Louise. Louise grows up unloved, marries John Hardy after a pregnancy scare that proves false, and becomes a wild, unhappy wife and mother, and her son David goes to live with Jesse at twelve. When Jesse takes the fifteen-year-old David into the woods to offer a lamb as a sacrifice and comes toward him with a knife, David knocks him down with a stone from his sling and leaves Winesburg for good.

   Why it mattersThe book’s longest tale tests the grotesque idea on three generations: Jesse’s one truth, that God has chosen him, makes him greedy for land and blind to the people around him. It also traces the change from a religious farm world to an age of machines, newspapers and money.

4. 4

   A Man of Ideas, Adventure, Respectability: Hidden stories

   Joe Welling, the Standard Oil agent, corners people with his sudden ideas, turns the town baseball team into winners, and courts Sarah King; when her feared father and brother wait in his room, he wins them over with a speech about wild grasses. In Adventure, Alice Hindman waits years for Ned Currie, who left for the city and forgot her, until one rainy night she runs naked into the yard and calls to a passing stranger, a deaf old man. In Respectability, Wash Williams, the ugly telegraph operator who hates all women, tells George how his young wife betrayed him and how her mother pushed her naked into the parlor where he sat waiting.

   Why it mattersEach tale sets a public face against a private life the town knows nothing about. Wash tells his story to George because he saw him kissing Belle Carpenter and wants to warn him.

5. 5

   The Thinker, Tandy, The Strength of God, The Teacher: Hunger and faith

   Seth Richmond, the silent boy the town calls deep, is irritated when George asks him to tell Helen White that George loves her, and after a walk with Helen he decides that love will always go to talkers like George, never to him. In Tandy, a drunken stranger tells Tom Hard’s small daughter to be Tandy, strong enough to be loved, and she begs to be called by that name. In The Strength of God, the Reverend Curtis Hartman breaks a corner of his church study window to watch the teacher Kate Swift in bed, until one January night he sees her praying naked and smashes the window with his fist. The Teacher tells the same night from Kate’s side: she walks through the snow to the Eagle office, lets George take her in his arms, then beats his face with her fists and runs away, just before Hartman bursts in with his bleeding hand.

   Why it mattersThe Strength of God and The Teacher show one night from two sides, the closest the tales come to interlocking. Hartman takes his desire for a woman as a message from God, Kate’s wish to open life to George turns into physical desire, and George, at the center, understands none of it yet.

6. 6

   Loneliness, An Awakening, Queer, The Untold Lie: Failing to speak

   Enoch Robinson, who never grew up, tells George how he filled his New York room with imaginary people, drove away the one real woman who understood him, and lost them all. In An Awakening, George has a vision of order in the night streets and goes to Belle Carpenter feeling like a man, only to be thrown into the bushes by her real suitor, the bartender Ed Handby. In Queer, Elmer Cowley, desperate not to seem strange, fails to speak to George, then beats him on the station platform and escapes on the midnight train. In The Untold Lie, the farmhand Ray Pearson runs across the fields to warn young Hal Winters against marriage, finds Hal has already decided to marry, and walks home thinking that whatever he said would have been a lie.

   Why it mattersEach tale turns on a failed attempt to say something that matters. George hears Enoch out with sympathy, but in the next two tales he is humiliated, once by his own vanity and once by someone who has made him a symbol of the town.

7. 7

   Drink, Death: Two ways out

   Tom Foster, a gentle boy raised in the rough streets of Cincinnati, gets drunk once, on purpose, to learn what it is to suffer, and George, angry at first when Tom claims to have made love to Helen White, ends up caring for him. In Death, Elizabeth Willard’s visits to Doctor Reefy years before come to light: she tells him her life, they nearly become lovers, and much later she dies without telling George about the eight hundred dollars her father gave her. Sitting with her body, George becomes convinced the lovely figure under the sheet is not his mother, and murmurs words that echo what Reefy and an old lover once said to her.

   Why it mattersDeath completes Elizabeth’s story and pushes George toward leaving. The hidden money, meant first to free her and then him, stays in the wall.

8. 8

   Sophistication, Departure: Leaving Winesburg

   On the night of the county fair, George, lonely and older since his mother’s death, finds Helen White, home from college in Cleveland, and they sit in silence in the empty grandstand, kiss and draw back, and play like children on the hill, each taking from the other the thing needed. In Departure, George walks Trunion Pike one last time, shakes hands on the station platform, and leaves on the morning train; Helen runs to say goodbye but he does not see her, and as he thinks of small things, Winesburg becomes the background for the dreams of his manhood.

   Why it mattersThe last tales show George reaching the understanding the grotesques never found, if only for an evening. Whether he will become the writer who can tell their stories is left open.

Characters and how they connect

Character Relationships who connects to whom, and the themes that bind them

Themes in Winesburg, Ohio what the novel is really about

Symbols & motifs

Important quotes

The ending of Winesburg, Ohio, explained

The book ends quietly. Early on an April morning George Willard takes one last walk out along Trunion Pike and back. At the station more than a dozen people shake his hand, and Gertrude Wilmot from the post office, who never noticed him before, says good luck. His father’s last advice is to watch his money and not look like a greenhorn. Helen White runs to the station to say goodbye, but George has already found his seat and does not see her. On the train he counts his money, then finds himself thinking not of his mother’s death or his future but of small things: Turk Smallet (spelled Smollet in The Thinker) wheeling boards, the lamplighter with his torch, Helen putting a stamp on a letter. When he opens his eyes, the town is gone, and his life there has become a background for the dreams of his manhood. Readers disagree about how hopeful this is. Many see George as a young version of the old writer in the prologue, and perhaps of Anderson himself: the listener who has gathered these lives and may one day tell them with sympathy, as Kate Swift and his mother hoped. On that reading the closing images of ordinary people are the start of his art. Others stress how little he has understood. Kate Swift said it would be ten years before he knew what she meant, he does not see Helen running to say goodbye, and the book says his mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. There is irony too in the eight hundred dollars his mother saved for this very moment, which lies unspent in the wall. The book does not decide whether George will become a real writer or simply one more young man leaving a small town, and that open question is part of its point.

Common misreadings

Test yourself

Flashcards flip, self-grade, and the deck remembers what you know

This book is a set of connected stories about the people in a small Ohio town called Winesburg. Many of them are lonely and strange because each one has grabbed hold of one idea and let it twist their whole life. A lot of them tell their secrets to George Willard, a teenager who writes for the town newspaper. George’s mother is sick and sad and hopes he will grow up to say the things she never could. Over the book George makes mistakes, gets beaten up twice, and slowly starts to understand other people. After his mother dies, he spends a quiet evening with his friend Helen and feels truly understood. At the end he gets on a train and leaves town to start his grown-up life.

Compare & connect the story universe

Discussion & essay prompts for class, or your next paper

Key questions students ask

• What is a grotesque in Winesburg Ohio
• Is Winesburg Ohio a novel or a short story collection
• What happens to George Willard at the end of Winesburg Ohio
• What is The Book of the Grotesque about
• How is loneliness shown in Winesburg Ohio
• What does Elizabeth Willard want for George