I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old
when I first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio. 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. 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. In those days only one other book seemed to
offer so powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy's
Jude the Obscure.