Ambitious And Successful Man In Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

In Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio, the protagonist, George Willard, maneuvers through a town of grotesques, interacting with them, and listening and recording their experiences while also learning and changing himself. Many of Winesburg’s residents see George as someone who can guide them and understand them, in part due to his role as a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle; however, he has his own lessons to learn about life, love, and what it means to be a man. Each of his encounters allows him to grow a little on the road from a naïve adolescent to an ambitious and successful man. The relationships George develops with others in Winesburg facilitate this growth — Wing Biddlebaum first plants the seed of dreams into George’s mind,

Sitting next to his mother, George thinks about kissing Helen White, showing his immaturity; however, he instantly begins to feel guilty and is overcome by a conviction that the ‘unspeakably lovely’ woman next to him is not the mother he knew. Filled with grief, he held the belief that the “body before him was alive, that in another moment a lovely woman would spring out of the bed and confront him” (pg 235). George began to see his mother not as the sickly woman who wandered through the halls, but as a woman who possessed a spirit that was beaten down but did not disappear completely. George shows a sense of maturity for the first time when he utters his mother’s refrain out loud, “The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear” (pg 236). Although he did not know what it is, he recognizes that he is changing, that something within him is stirring and it 's something that his mother’s previous suitor and Doctor Reefy, both