I’m from someplace not light years different from Winesburg, Ohio – both shithole and not, somewhere in the vast expanse, a bit more scraggly and overgrown for sure, but the same soul is present. More places you come from than places to go, even if you wind up back there. Or you never leave, and whether that’s comfort or stasis is a matter of perspective.

Langston Hughes may have been writing about dreams deferred in Harlem, but the funny thing about American life is it has a way of deferring dreams all over the place. Easier to conjure, and easier to defer. And this is something Sherwood Anderson saw too.

The term he used was “grotesques.” Once-purer souls made hideous by the failures of their aspirations.

In each story, a small-town reporter is the eye onto this little place, the infinite minor cuts and losses and jolts that define it. This sounds boring in the modern context – look how much mediocre fiction in the late 20th Century retread these same themes – but Anderson has a unique tempo. There are neither grand gestures nor are there studied attempts at minimalism. There’s none of the filth or ribaldry that Raymond Carver had, or any of the deep sorrow of the sad Southern ladies. Anderson, instead, writes about people contained in their emotions, unable to express themselves, and who sigh or snarl their way through it. Even the period tone seems strange, deeply antique it some parts – farmhands engaged in unmechanized agriculture – and others deeply modern – a seemingly 20th Century attitude towards life and the role of the individual. And when I picked this up as a teenager, it fit the world of railroad tracks and cattails and gas station fountain drinks around me.

Anderson didn’t do much after this. He famously started writing after a psychotic break and the abandonment of his family. Winesburg was his only major work, with later stuff generally considered lousy, and he became the once-famous writer living on a farm in Virginia, although for him that may well have been bliss. If we go to that other review site, Winesburg has 36,000 ratings, while 2nd place, a volume of stories I’ve never heard of, has a mere 590. He died a blooper-reel death from a swallowed toothpick on a cruise line in the 1950s, a final ignoble kick.

But on the rare occasions when I go home, or when I see news coming out, it’s hard not to think about the grotesques. I’m probably one too.