George Willard
The eighteen-year-old reporter on the town's weekly paper, and the person almost everyone else in the town seeks out after dark.
To get out of Winesburg and look at people. He tells his mother he does not know where he will go or what he will do, and then says it plainly: "I just want to go away and look at people and think."
The book
At a glance
- Reporter for the Winesburg Eagle, the town's weekly paper
- Eighteen through the closing stories
- The New Willard House, his father's hotel on Main Street
- Son of Tom Willard, the hotel keeper and the leading Democrat in a Republican town, and of Elizabeth Willard, who owns the hotel on paper
- Most of the twenty-two stories, and every one of the last four
- His father secured it for him, and wants him to wake up and use it
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeGeorge Willard is the central figure of Winesburg, Ohio, the 1919 book of linked short stories by the American writer Sherwood Anderson. He is eighteen, the only reporter on the town's weekly paper, the Winesburg Eagle, and he lives at the New Willard House, the failing hotel his father runs. His job is to collect small facts and print as many of his neighbors' names as he can fit into an issue: who went to the county seat on business, who is putting up a new barn on the Valley Road.
That job is the reason the book keeps returning to him. Story after story ends with one of the townspeople finding him after dark and trying to say the thing they have never said to anyone. They include a frightened old man on a porch, a doctor convinced the town is about to hang him, a telegraph operator who hates every woman alive, and a schoolteacher who cannot make him understand what she means. He is not wise and usually does not understand, but he is the one person in Winesburg who might write it down, and young enough that warning him still seems worth doing.
Around those confessions he does the ordinary things an eighteen-year-old does. He decides to fall in love on purpose because he wants to write a love story. He goes out with girls, behaves badly, and feels sick about it afterward. His mother dies in March of the year he turns eighteen.
How the book draws them
- His job at the paperThe Winesburg Eagle has one editorial policy: print as many townspeople's names as possible every week. George Willard runs about all day writing items on a pad. A. P. Wringlet has received a shipment of straw hats. Ed Byerbaum and Tom Marshall were in Cleveland Friday. Uncle Tom Sinnings is building a new barn.
- Where he livesThe New Willard House, his father's hotel, which is shabby and always on the edge of failure. One window of his room looks down into an alleyway and the other across the railroad tracks to a lunch room by the station.
- The habit of talking to himselfHe says things aloud when he is alone, trying them out. His mother used to kneel outside his door to listen for it, because the habit was her proof that something in him was still growing.
- Why the town confides in himPartly because he is a reporter and might one day write it down, partly because he is still young enough to be warned off. The berry picker with the restless hands, a doctor with almost no patients, the town's telegraph operator, a failed painter home from New York, the schoolteacher and the Presbyterian minister all seek him out after dark with the one thing they have never told anyone.
- How much of it he understandsVery little at the time. After Kate Swift, his old schoolteacher, talks to him for an hour and then runs out of the office, he lies awake until four in the morning and can only manage, "I have missed something."
- The nights with girlsHe goes to meet Louise Trunnion after she sends him a note saying she is his if he wants her, and afterward stands in the rain on Main Street telling himself that nobody knows. Later he walks out with Belle Carpenter, a milliner who is using him to make her real suitor jealous, and the suitor throws him into the bushes three times.
- What he says he wants to beA writer. He tells his friend Seth Richmond it is the easiest of all lives, that you can be in India or in a boat in the South Seas and have only to write and there you are. He has published nothing but local items.
- The night in the alleywayIn the story 'An Awakening' he wanders into the laborers' end of town, stands for half an hour in a dark alley behind the cow sheds, and comes out convinced he has understood something enormous about order and law. The feeling does not survive the evening.
His mother dies in March and he takes it strangely. He is half annoyed, because a note had come from Helen White and now the evening is spoiled. Sitting alone with the body he becomes convinced that , half lifts the sheet, loses his nerve and goes out into the hallway shaking. The eight hundred dollars she had hidden to give him his start .
The book closes on two evenings. In 'Sophistication' he and Helen White climb to the empty grandstand at the fairground after the county fair has emptied out and sit in the dark without saying much. In 'Departure' he takes the 7:45 westbound in April. The conductor, Tom Little, knows him well, punches his ticket and makes no comment, having seen a thousand George Willards leave their towns for the city.