A Landmark In American Modernist Fiction

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) takes an important place in the twentieth century American literature. He has been regarded as one of the founders of American modemist fiction. In Winesburg, Ohio, his masterpiece, Anderson explores systematically the impacts brought by industrialization to a small town of Middle Western during the transitional period in American history, reveals the lonely soul of its residents who have dropped out of their time, shows their living situation and depicts a picture of a group of grotesques in this small town. This book played the role of a landmark for modem American literature and pointed out a new way for the development of American modemist fiction in the fields of theme, content, structure and creative writing techniques. It provides an important link between the modernist literature of the first quarter of the twentieth century and American writing today. The modemist themes of crisis, disillusionment, isolation and grotesqueness, the loosely-knitted story structure, the simple and colloquial language, the symbolic images and the epiphanic moments in Winesburg, Ohio, make a profound influence on the whole generation of American writers that follow Sherwood Anderson, including Emest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck, etc. In this paper, the author gives some research into Winesburg, Ohio by analyzing its social and cultural background, its modernist theme, and Anderson's writing techniques, and draws the conclusion that Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio have made profound influences on American modernist literature and this book deserves to be an important landmark of American modernist fiction.