Winesburg, Ohio

The same move repeats across roughly two dozen sketches, one private crisis of loneliness after another, without enough incident to carry the length. Some readers push back hard on the prose itself, calling it “poor language of a schoolboy” rather than quietly beautiful, and one flags the whole book as “very sketchy and repetitive.” Characters often read as a single idea in a coat, repression or loneliness standing in for a full person, and the book's treatment of its women, regretful, used, or written as predatory toward younger men, reads as dated rather than psychologically rich. A skeptical reader calls the collection “aggressively unspectacular” and wonders if the 1919 publication date is doing more work than the writing: “I don't see what the big deal is with this book.” One critic sums up the mood bleakly: “no one really knew each other at all.”