The Deep Dive: Visiting Winesburg, Ohio

Vol. III, No. 291 - Sherwood Anderson's Classic Novel About Small Town People Still Rings True

In many of our communities, there is a particular type of person you recognize the moment you walk into a city council or city commission meeting. They have been coming for a while now. They sit in the same chair. They wait through the agenda for their moment, and when they get to the microphone, they say the same thing they said the last time they were there, and the time before. They have a truth. It is their truth. And it has long since stopped being true.

In those same communities, that kind of “truth” doesn’t just come from the audience. It comes from the other side of the dais. We have a growing number of elected officials who keep telling the same tired story of civic boosterism, built on past projects and old victories, as if replaying the highlight reel were the same thing as casting a vision. These are towns that, in many ways, have gotten comfortable resting on their laurels—talking about what they were, not wrestling with what they need to become.

Sherwood Anderson described this pattern in 1919. He called these people grotesques.