About 10+ years ago, I had never heard of the book *Winesburg, Ohio*, but if you can’t tell by my user name, it’s now one of my absolute favorites. Here’s where the weirdness comes in.
I’m 99% sure that I only learned about it when casually scrolling through wikipedia’s page on the Great American Novel about 10-15 years ago to see how many books were considered the GAN to some degree. It had a fairly memorable title, and a year or so later I was at a friend’s housewarming party, and they had a huge set of book shelves built into the walls in the basement that were mostly filled with books left there by the sellers who were old, and I believe one of them had already died of some type of cancer (*based on a whole section of books about this*). I spent some time looking through those shelves, and my friend told me I could have whatever from the majority of them filled with came-with-the-house titles. There was an old copy of *Winesburg, Ohio*, and I remembered the title from that GAN list, so I took it and ended up falling in love with it.
More recently I checked the wiki page for Great American Novel, and this book is nowhere to be seen on it. I don’t want to go through the page’s gargantuan revision history, but I feel like I’m in some sort of personal Mandela Effect about this book being on this list. **Does anyone have any idea if this book was on this list at any point, or if there’s some other easy-to-find list I may have been looking at to discover this title?**
by WinesburgOhio
4 Comments
Because it’s a short story cycle, not a novel. Likely the Wikipedia entry got edited to reflect that.
This is the only reference to that book and the phrase “great american novel” I could find in 2 minutes of googling: https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/the-first-great-american-novel
I love it too. I think I read it also because I found it on a list of 100 great books
I’m not sure about it’s position on Wikipedia’s list of great American novels, but it’s one of my favorite books as well. I read it during the pandemic, and since I grew up in a small town in Ohio it really hit me. I love that even though it’s a bunch of short stories and vignettes, it all really hangs together. And despite the fact that I was growing up in a small Ohio town on the other side of the 20th century, the feeling of entrapment seemed awfully familiar.