"Nothing quite like it has ever been done in America. . . . It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own," wrote H.L. Mencken, speaking of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson, he said, is "America's Most Distinctive Novelist."

Windy McPherson's Son, Anderson's 1916 first novel, concerns a boy's life in Iowa. Like all of Anderson's tales, it's an important social commentary, and not to be overlooked.