debris of suffering and defeat. In each story one of
them emerges, shyly or with a false assertiveness,
trying to reach out to companionship and love, driven
almost mad by the search for human connection. In the
economy of Winesburg these grotesques matter less in
their own right than as agents or symptoms of that
"indefinable hunger" for meaning which is Anderson's
preoccupation.

Brushing against one another, passing one another in
the streets or the fields, they see bodies and hear
voices, but it does not really matter--they are
disconnected, psychically lost. Is this due to the
particular circumstances of small-town America as
Anderson saw it at the turn of the century? Or does he
feel that he is sketching an inescapable human
condition which makes all of 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