It did not greatly increase the novelist’s reputation. The previous year he had published his famous collection of short stories, “Winesburg, Ohio.” This is a first-rate psychological document. Anderson has now definitely given up sociology to become a psychologist and a specialist in the study of dual personalities. “Winesburg, Ohio,” is entirely in harmony with the most recent contributions of American literature to psychoanalysis. It is as rich and original in intuition as the books of Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters and Eugene O’Neill. Winesburg is a sort of Main Street, not in breadth but in depth. Each one of these stories is a masterpiece of dramatized insight. They stage the tragedy of moral failure. The real drama is not enacted in the open but in the gloom of what the author names “the well,” deep under the surface of existence. It is the tragedy of evasion. The scene is the provincial United States of half a century ago, somewhere in and around Chicago. The novelist ascribes the neurasthenia of his characters, their errantry and their inconsistency in thought and action to the shock of too sudden a transition from the old order to the new. Mystic Anderson once more denounces our times as the most materialistic in the history of the world, as an epoch where wars are fought without patriotism, when men substitute their vague ethics to the worship of the living God, when the will-to-power replaces the will-to-serve, when beauty has been almost entirely forgotten in the terrible race for money. But the stories of “Winesburg, Ohio” cannot be limited to the American scene. Their appeal is broadly human and universal. Admirable as studies of morbid psychology, they are still more so as dramatizations of our secret thoughts. Within their limited bounds they contain the most suggestive portraits. The eccentrics, the maniacs, the daydreamers and the half-insane whom, up to now, have been relegated to the background of Anderson’s books, occupy the center of the stage. The novelist has most skilfully succeeded in grouping the different anecdotes and in giving to all his people a family air of resemblance. He has individualized the morbid states of sensibility, with something akin to genius. His psychology is utterly pessimistic, as every true psychology must be. It is based on the observation of distortions and abortions caused by moral restraint. Anderson introduces us to human beings condemned to intellectual and moral decrepitude. The surrounding mediocrity has atrophied their moral life, without killing their elementary instincts. All these half-insane and these maniacs are dual personalities for themselves and for others. Winesburg is the city of hypocrites, or, as we prefer to call them to-day, the city of the inhibited.[43] As we watch this parade of lunatics of both sexes, we cannot think of a stranger Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.[44]