“I am in love with my wife,” he said—a superfluous remark, as I had not questioned his attachment to the woman he had married. We walked for ten minutes and then he said it again. I turned to look at him. He began to talk and told me the tale I am now about to […]

Winifred Walker understood some things clearly enough. She understood that when a man is put behind iron bars he is in prison. Marriage was marriage to her. It was that to her husband Hugh Walker, too, as he found out. Still he didn’t understand. It might have been better had he understood, then he might […]

ALICE HINDMAN, a woman of twenty-seven when George Willard was a mere boy, had lived in Winesburg all her life. She clerked in Winney’s Dry Goods Store and lived with her mother, who had married a second husband. Alice’s step-father was a carriage painter, and given to drink. His story is an odd one. It […]

The story came to me from a woman met on a train. The car was crowded and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the offing who belonged with her—a slender girlish figure of a man in a heavy brown canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved […]

MARY COCHRAN went out of the rooms where she lived with her father, Doctor Lester Cochran, at seven o’clock on a Sunday evening. It was June of the year nineteen hundred and eight and Mary was eighteen years old. She walked along Tremont to Main Street and across the railroad tracks to Upper Main, lined […]

HE WAS AN OLD MAN and he sat on the steps of the railroad station in a small Kentucky town. A well dressed man, some traveler from the city, approached and stood before him. The old man became self-conscious. His smile was like the smile of a very young child. His face was all sunken […]

He was a small man with a beard and was very nervous. I remember how the cords of his neck were drawn taut. For years he had been trying to cure people of illness by the method called psychoanalysis. The idea was the passion of his life.”I came here because I am tired,” he said […]

DOCTOR PARCIVAL was a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow mustache. He always wore a dirty white waistcoat out of the pockets of which protruded a number of the kind of black cigars known as stogies. His teeth were black and irregular and there was something strange about his eyes. The […]

HER name was Elsie Leander and her girlhood was spent on her father’s farm in Vermont. For several generations the Leanders had all lived on the same farm and had all married thin women, and so she was thin. The farm lay in the shadow of a mountain and the soil was not very rich. […]

Below the hill there was a swamp in which cattails grew. The wind rustled the dry leaves of a walnut tree that grew on top of the hill. She went beyond the tree to where the grass was long and matted. In the farmhouse a door bangs and in the road before the house a […]

ELIZABETH WILLARD, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and her face was marked with smallpox scars. Although she was but forty-five, some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure. Listlessly she went about the disorderly old hotel looking at the faded wall-paper and the ragged carpets and, when she […]

WE GOT UP at four in the morning, that first day in the east. On the evening before we had climbed off a freight train at the edge of town, and with the true instinct of Kentucky boys had found our way across town and to the race track and the stables at once. Then […]

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 […]

It was a hard jolt for me, one of the most bitterest I ever had to face. And it all came about through my own foolishness too. Even yet sometimes, when I think of it, I want to cry or swear or kick myself. Perhaps, even now, after all this time, there will be a […]

MY father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheerful,kindly man. Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as afarm-hand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near thetown of Bidwell, Ohio. He had then a horse of his own and on Saturdayevenings drove into town to spend a […]

Napoleon went down into a battle riding on a horse. Alexander went down into a battle riding on a horse. General Grant got off a horse and walked in a wood. General Hindenburg stood on a hill. The moon came up out of a clump of bushes. * * * * * I am writing […]

ALICE HINDMAN, a woman of twenty-seven when George Willard was a mere boy, had lived in Winesburg all her life. She clerked in Winney’s Dry Goods Store and lived with her mother, who had married a second husband. Alice’s step-father was a carriage painter, and given to drink. His story is an odd one. It […]