Chris Powers in The Guardian:
Winesburg, Ohio is a story cycle set in a small town in the 1890s. Each story concentrates on a different “grotesque” who inhabits the town, people whose lives have become distorted through an inability to communicate. For Anderson these “grotesques” are not monsters to be feared, but creatures to be pitied and loved. Many of them feel compelled to explain themselves in some way to a young man called George Willard, the closest thing the book has to a hero. George matures over the course of the collection, and in the final story leaves Winesburg behind. The effect of the book is to cumulatively produce an atmosphere of uncomfortable but compelling intimacy. Throughout, hands appear as symbols of the desirability and difficulty of human contact, and it was hands that Edward Wilson Jr used to precisely describe the feeling of reading it: “We are at once disturbed and soothed by the feeling of hands thrust down among the deepest bowels of life – hands delicate but still pitiless in their exploration.”
More here.