An American critic and scholar, Burbank has written studies of Thornton Wilder, Jane Austen, and early American literature. In the following excerpt from his Sherwood Anderson, Burbank discusses the significance of the unconventional narrative sequence used in Winesburg, Ohio.

In 1914, the famous exhibition of post-Impressionist paintings was held in the Chicago Armory, where Anderson went . . . on afternoons to see the works of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and others among the "French moderns." Like such "Impressionists" as Monet, Renoir, and Degas before them, these painters portrayed the impressions of experience upon the consciousness of the artist, or of an observer with whom the artist identified himself, rather than the external appearances of events and objects. But they went even beyond the Impressionists in attempting to convey not only the subjective experience of the artist or observer but the abstract structure beneath natural forms. . . .

Van Gogh deliberately distorted his...