complicated syntax. In actuality,
Anderson developed an artful style in which, following
Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to
use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic
prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom
found in ordinary speech or even oral narration. What
Anderson employs here is a stylized version of the
American language, sometimes rising to quite formal
rhetorical patterns and sometimes sinking to a
self-conscious mannerism. But at its best, Anderson's
prose style in Winesburg, Ohio is a supple instrument,
yielding that "low fine music" which he admired so much
in the stories of Turgenev.

One of the worst fates that can befall a writer is that
of self-imitation: the effort later in life, often
desperate, to recapture the tones and themes of
youthful beginnings. Something of the sort happened
with Anderson's later writings. Most critics and
readers grew impatient with the work he did after, say,
1927 or 1928; they felt he was constantly repeating his
gestures of emotional "groping"--what he had called in
Winesburg, Ohio the "indefinable hunger" that prods and
torments people. It became the critical fashion to see
Anderson's "gropings" as a sign of delayed adolescence,
a failure to develop as a writer. Once he wrote a
chilling reply to those who dismissed him in this way:
"I don't think it matters much, all this calling a man
a muddler, a groper, etc.... The very man who throws
such words as these knows in his heart that he is also
facing a wall." This remark seems to me both dignified
and strong, yet it must be admitted that there was some
justice in the negative responses to his later work.
For what characterized it was not so much "groping" as
the imitation of "groping," the self-caricature of a
writer who feels driven back upon an earlier self that
is, alas, no longer available.

But Winesburg, Ohio remains a vital work, fresh and
authentic. Most of its stories are composed in a minor
key, a tone of subdued pathos--pathos marking both the
nature and limit of Anderson's talent. (He spoke of
himself as a "minor writer.") In a few stories,
however, he was able to reach beyond pathos and to
strike a tragic note. The single best story in
Winesburg, Ohio is, I think, "The Untold Lie," in which
the urgency of choice becomes an outer sign of a tragic
element in the human condition. And in Anderson's
single greatest story, "The Egg," which appeared a few
years after