Before Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Ford, there was Sherwood Anderson, who, with Winesburg, Ohio, charted a new direction in American fiction--evoking with lyrical simplicity quiet moments of epiphany in the lives of ordinary men and women. In a bed, elevated so that he can peer out the window, an old writer contemplates the fluttering of his heart and considers, as if viewing a pageant, the inhabitants of a small midwestern town. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon. &quot;Nothing quite like it has ever been done in America,&quot; wrote H. L. Mencken. &quot;It is so vivid, so full of insight, so shiningly life-like and glowing, that the book is lifted into a category all its own.&quot;<br><br>With Commentary by Sherwood Anderson, Rebecca West, and Hart Crane