40 Fun Facts About Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio, died in Panama after accidentally swallowing which small object?

A toothpick, an autopsy found, had pierced his insides and caused fatal peritonitis; he was taken ill on a cruise to South America, aged 64.

In Loneliness, what does Enoch Robinson fill his locked New York room with once he stops inviting friends in?

Shadow people, about two dozen figures of his own fancy, share the room and let him talk last and best, among them a woman with a sword and an old man trailed by a dog.

Wash Williams, the filthy woman-hater of Respectability, holds which job at the Winesburg railroad station?

Telegraph operator was a trade he had once been called the best at in the whole state, before his marriage collapsed and he was tucked away in the obscure Winesburg office.

In The Strength of God, what does Reverend Curtis Hartman smash with his fist after watching Kate Swift pray?

A church window in the bell tower was his peephole into her bedroom, and he hurries off bleeding to tell George Willard that God has appeared to him in her.

Paper Pills likens Doctor Reefy's courtship to which gnarled fruit, left on Winesburg's trees by the pickers?

Apples too twisted to ship to the city hold all their sweetness in one small spot, the tale says, and they look like the knuckles of the doctor's hands.

Sophistication opens on the day of which annual event, which has packed Winesburg's Main Street with country people?

The county fair is over by the time George Willard and Helen White climb to its empty grandstand, where they sit in the dark and hardly speak.

In Adventure, what does lonely Alice Hindman do on impulse before crawling home in shame?

She runs outside naked into the rain and calls to a passing man, who proves old and somewhat deaf; she ends the tale facing the fact that many people live and die alone.

Tom and Elizabeth Willard run which failing Winesburg business, which once belonged to Elizabeth's father?

A hotel called the New Willard House, it is still recorded in Elizabeth's name, and its shabbiness comes to stand for her own defeated life.

Which novelist, whose early career Sherwood Anderson helped launch, mocked him in the parody The Torrents of Spring?

Ernest Hemingway aimed the parody at Dark Laughter, the only bestseller Anderson ever had, which had come out the year before.

Enoch Robinson of Loneliness leaves his mother's farm near Winesburg for New York hoping to become what?

A painter was the plan: he studied French and went to an art school, meaning to finish his training in Paris, but nothing ever turned out for him.

George Willard is the young reporter on which Winesburg newspaper, a job his father Tom arranged for him?

The Eagle, in full the Winesburg Eagle, is a weekly owned and edited by Will Henderson, and the post puts George where half the town comes to confide in him.

Which story comes last of all in Winesburg, Ohio?

Departure ends with George lost in small memories in his seat, and when he looks up the town has slipped out of sight for good.

Sherwood Anderson wrote the Winesburg tales in a Chicago rooming house while earning his living in which trade?

Advertising paid the bills: he said the tales came to him on evenings in his room, and sometimes during the day at the office where he wrote copy.

Which weather keeps nearly all of Winesburg in bed on the night Kate Swift visits George Willard in The Teacher?

Deep snow leaves only four of the town's eighteen hundred citizens awake, and one of them is a minister shivering in a bell tower.

In the story Hands, Wing Biddlebaum's nervous fingers make him Winesburg's fastest picker of which crop?

Strawberries, as many as a hundred and forty quarts in a day, made his fingers the town's pride, though he spent his life trying to keep them out of sight.

In Godliness, David Hardy fells his grandfather Jesse Bentley with which weapon before fleeing Winesburg for good?

A sling he carried for shooting squirrels fires the stone, as Jesse comes running with the long knife meant for a sacrifice; the boy believes he has killed him.

Helen White, the girl George Willard walks out with in Sophistication, is the daughter of the town's what?

Banker White owns a new stone house that is one of the prides of Winesburg, and Helen's mother declares nobody in town fit company for her.

In the prologue to Winesburg, Ohio, an old writer gives which name to people who seize one truth and live by it?

Grotesques are made, in his theory, the moment a person claims a truth as their own, at which point the truth they embraced turns into a falsehood.

Elizabeth Willard, who once shocked Winesburg by cycling in men's clothes, dreamed as a girl of which career?

Acting drew her because touring companies lodged with her father, yet the players she confided in told her their life was as dull as the town's.

Sherwood Anderson modelled fictional Winesburg largely on which real Ohio town, his home from the age of eight?

Clyde's streets and townspeople match many in the book, though Anderson claimed the hint for almost every character came from fellow lodgers in a big-city rooming house.

In Mother, which weapon does Elizabeth Willard take from a cloth bag, meaning to stab her husband Tom?

Sewing scissors in hand, she plans to make herself up from a box left by stranded players and stride downstairs like a tigress, but her strength fails and the plan dies.

In Mother, Elizabeth Willard watches the baker Abner Groff carry on a long feud with which animal?

A cat belonging to the druggist keeps slipping into the bakery, and the baker's useless rages come to seem to her a rehearsal of her own life.

In Death, where has Elizabeth Willard kept the eight hundred dollars her father gave her to escape Winesburg?

Behind the wall plaster by her bed it stays: she dies before telling George, so the money meant to give him his start in the city lies there undiscovered.

The long, narrow room at the centre of Loneliness looks out on which public space in New York City?

Washington Square is where Enoch Robinson rents his six-dollar room, shaped like a hallway, and the narrator calls the tale more the room's than the man's.

In Loneliness, the woman whose visits end Enoch Robinson's happy solitude is thought to play which instrument?

Violin is only his guess, since he never entered her room; when she walked out for the last time, he says, all his invented company followed her through the door.

Respectability opens by comparing Wash Williams to which ugly caged animal that city children stop to stare at?

A monkey with sagging skin and a purple underbody is the picture, though the narrator admits one part of Wash stays clean and shapely: his hands.

In Respectability, what does Wash Williams's mother-in-law do that turns his grief into lifelong hatred?

She sends in his wife unclothed, hoping the sight will win him back; he had come ready to forgive, and instead he struck the older woman with a chair.

Wash Williams tells his tale in Respectability after seeing George Willard kiss which Winesburg hat trimmer?

Belle Carpenter trims hats in Kate McHugh's millinery shop, and Wash says he speaks only to put the young man on his guard against women.

In The Teacher, what does Kate Swift tell George Willard a writer must learn, instead of fooling with words?

What people are thinking, not what they say, is her lesson, and she warns him against becoming a mere peddler of words.

How does Kate Swift suddenly end her embrace with George Willard in the newspaper office in The Teacher?

She beats his face with two sharp little fists and flees, moments before the minister bursts in to proclaim her an instrument of God.

What is Kate Swift doing in bed, besides reading, when Reverend Curtis Hartman first spies her from the bell tower?

Smoking a cigarette is what horrifies the minister at first, yet before long he has made himself a peephole so that he can go on watching her.

In The Untold Lie, the young farmhand Hal Winters asks Ray Pearson whether he ought to do what?

Marry his pregnant lover or abandon her is the choice; Ray races across the fields to warn him off, then says nothing, deciding any advice would have been a lie.

Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, credited Winesburg, Ohio as an inspiration for which other book of his?

The Martian Chronicles grew from a wish he formed at 24, on reading Anderson's book: to write something as good as it but set on another planet.

Whom does Helen White slip away from in Sophistication so that she can spend the evening with George Willard?

A college instructor, brought home as her mother's guest, bores her with city airs while privately musing that a scholar ought to wed money.

In the 1920s Sherwood Anderson bought and edited two small-town newspapers of opposing politics in which state?

Virginia was home to both papers, one staunchly Democratic and one Republican, and he ran them together, sometimes writing as a character he called Buck Fever.

Hop Higgins, the night watchman in The Teacher, dreams of retiring to breed which animals for sale to sportsmen?

Ferrets, one male and three females, already live in his cellar, and he sits by the stove through the storm reckoning how many he will have by spring.

In The Teacher, Kate Swift tells her pupils invented tales about which English essayist as if she had lived with him?

Charles Lamb became so real in her telling that the confused children supposed he must be someone who had once lived in Winesburg.

Sherwood Anderson reportedly stayed up all night reading which book of small-town poems, often linked to Winesburg?

Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters appeared in April 1915, months before the tales were written, and one reviewer called Winesburg the same thing put into prose.

Which magazine first printed the Winesburg tales Hands and The Strength of God, both during 1916?

The Masses, a socialist monthly, also ran the book's opening sketch, and ten of the tales reached magazine readers before the collection existed.

Joe Welling, the excitable talker of A Man of Ideas, works around Winesburg as the agent of which company?

Standard Oil gave him the post through his father, a legislator, and he collected bills and booked orders in several towns along the railroad.