In “Nobody Knows,” George has sex with Louise Trunnion, a local teenage girl. He pleads with George to write the book that he may never get to write, asking him to remember that “everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.” After a little girl is killed in a buggy accident, Parcival refuses to help other doctors in town and fears that this will cause him to be hanged. He attempts to mentor George Willard by imparting the same sense of hatred that he feels toward life. In “The Philosopher,” Doctor Parcival has become embittered by his wild life full of loss, failures, and mistakes. Elizabeth’s isolation and resentment over her lost youth leads her to become extremely possessive over George, and she plots to stab Tom when he suggests that their son should get serious about his life and possibly move away from Winesburg. His mother Elizabeth is chronically ill and largely bedbound, while his father Tom resents his wife and their deteriorating life. In “Mother,” George Willard’s parents, who have a dysfunctional marriage, own the New Willard House hotel in town. After her death, he isolates himself and spends his days grieving alone in his office. Reefy spends that winter happily sharing his philosophical musings with his new wife, but she tragically dies the following spring. The woman miscarries and she and Reefy are soon married. Reefy courts a much younger woman who comes to his medical practice because she has accidentally become pregnant. In “Paper Pills,” Doctor Reefy is possessed by a search for intellectual truth, constantly scribbling down his thoughts onto scraps of paper that he then rejects and leaves crumpled in his pockets or strewn around his office.
Wing now leads a broken, lonely existence after losing his reputation. After absentmindedly reaching out to touch George Willard during one of their conversations, Wing is horrified, as many years ago he was driven out of his old life as a schoolteacher in Pennsylvania after he was accused of molesting a student. In “Hands,” Wing Biddlebaum is alienated from the Winesburg community due to his strange habit of relentlessly moving his hands. The writer believes that truth is man-made and that becoming possessed by any one singular principle will lead to the corruption and destruction of the individual, a revelation he incorporates into a book of “grotesques” (or people who are deformed by obsession). In “The Book of the Grotesque,” an elderly writer in town has a dreamlike vision of a grotesque figure, which he records in a book.
Although each of the 25 stories focuses on a different character, the novel’s central plot arc is protagonist George Willard’s gradual coming-of-age. Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of loosely interconnected short stories that focus on the troubled inhabitants of a small midwestern town.
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