us bear the burden of
loneliness? Alice Hindman in the story "Adventure"
turns her face to the wall and tries "to force herself
to face the fact that many people must live and die
alone, even in Winesburg." Or especially in Winesburg?
Such impressions have been put in more general terms in
Anderson's only successful novel, Poor White:

All men lead their lives behind a wall of
misunderstanding they have themselves built,
and most men die in silence and unnoticed
behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut
off from his fellows by the peculiarities
of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing
something that is personal, useful and
beautiful. Word of his activities is
carried over the walls.

These "walls" of misunderstanding are only seldom due
to physical deformities (Wing Biddlebaum in "Hands") or
oppressive social arrangements (Kate Swift in "The
Teacher.") Misunderstanding, loneliness, the inability
to articulate, are all seen by Anderson as virtually a
root condition, something deeply set in our natures.
Nor are these people, the grotesques, simply to be
pitied and dismissed; at some point in their lives they
have known desire, have dreamt of ambition, have hoped
for friendship. In all of them there was once something
sweet, "like the twisted little apples that grow in the
orchards in Winesburg." Now, broken and adrift, they
clutch at some rigid notion or idea, a "truth" which
turns out to bear the stamp of monomania, leaving them
helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out but
unable to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses
inescapable to life, and it does so with a deep
fraternal sadness, a sympathy casting a mild glow over
the entire book. "Words," as the American writer Paula
Fox has said, "are nets through which all truth
escapes." Yet what do we have but words?

They want, these Winesburg grotesques, to unpack their
hearts, to release emotions buried and festering. Wash
Williams tries to explain his eccentricity but hardly
can; Louise Bentley "tried to talk but could say
nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world,
inventing "his own people to whom he could really talk
and to whom he explained the things he had been unable
to explain to living people."

In his own somber way, Anderson has here touched upon
one of the great themes of American literature,
especially Midwestern literature, in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the struggle
for speech as it