I love Sherwood Anderson so much. He speaks to the isolated part of me. His stories resonate with my experience of not belonging—not in the neighborhoods I grew up in, not with with my own family, not with my social circles, and not with the socio-economic class that I maneuvered my way into as an adult.

No one writes about separateness like he does. These stories touch some truth I know inside my soul every time I read them - in particular "In a Strange Town". ( )

The tone of these stories is that everything is finished. It is an evening book: many things have happened, many other days have gone on which have held more excitement, and those days are done; it is the right and proper time to tell the stories. It’s the conversational manner of grandparents of an evening, or a company of friends on a day off.
“Winesburg, Ohio” is the quintessential Anderson and as a result, it’s impossible to look at his other work without making comparisons. (The exception would be if you had read his other work before Winesburg, Ohio, but that’s impossible for me at this point, so I’ll go on with my tarnished imperfect perspective, coming into this spoiled, or educated, depending on your perspective.) Winesburg goes on through a town in a more singular thread, with the exceptional stories passing out on distinct branches from which one returns. Death in the Woods is more like a series of walks like spokes from a wheel, not leading to or coming from any larger venture, but different stories freed from the obligation to get you somewhere in the end. The most obvious spoke is the group of stories placed in the Appalachian mountains. It supported a theory that the perspective we have had towards people who live in the Appalachians is not new. Then it was lack of shoes, a certain toughness, a grit of those who make their own alcohol whether it’s illegal to buy it or not. Now it’s the isolation we respect, and the lack of resources we pity, but the attitude’s the same, with maybe less admiration for the unknown now.
Another spoke is the theme of writers. Anderson writes about writers as if even he does not know how they work. It’s as refreshing as a good craft talk, the completely useless kind where someone asks the famous writer how they get their ideas, how they finish a novel, and they laugh with that absolutely desolate merriment and tell you that it’s different every time, that no one really knows how to write. It’s impossible to tell how far Anderson’s narrator is from his own life; sometimes he seems to include his own biography as a way into the story.
His tone is always frank. I think if he was not removed from me in time, I may look less kindly on the stories which meander and trail off without any real resolution or climax, but because his experiences are always new to me, I enjoyed this nonetheless. I’ve got a lot of respect for the way he tells the parts of a story that need to be told, not pretending at economy of words or unnecessary poetry. ( )