Art Np2

This is supposed to be over with, but as Wide Awake Jake says I am slow, surly, and contrary, it took me over a day to finish what should have been done yesterday. I loved Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.  The book is about the people of a small town in Ohio after the Civil War and before industrialization, and how their strong narrow concentration on specific truths make them self destructive, and/or lonely, and/or out of touch with reality.  The narrator calls them grotesques.   I saw how this book influenced Ann Petry when she wrote A Country Place .  That book is also about a small town and people who live in close proximity to others who are quietly struggling and trying to figure out what to do next.  Ann Petry's town is in Connecticut.  I thought quiet struggle was a mid-western way of doing things.  A Country Place is set after World War II.  Both are coming of age stories that involve moving away from t...

"Hands" from Winesburg, Ohio Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. "Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it's falling into your eyes," commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white fo...