Winesburg, Ohio (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

Winesburg, Ohio is one of the most influential twentieth-century works of fiction by an American author. Most of the major American fiction writers who emerged in the 1920s and 1930s—including Nobel Prize for Literature recipients William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck—confessed publicly that Sherwood Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio had inspired their own work. Published in 1919 on the vanguard of the Modernist movement in American literature, Anderson’s book is an innovative cycle of interconnected short stories that together form a complex larger work; hence, Winesburg, Ohio is generally referred to as a novel rather than as a short-story collection.