How Sherwood Anderson influenced so many - and then was forgotten

Who didn't read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, years ago, and who wouldn't admit that, for all its tendentiousness and at times pretension, it wasn't a tremendous influence? Every young writer or aspiring writer probably read it, in my gen usually in an old Modern Library ed., and I remember not only being blown away by the simplicity of the stories, each a stark evocation of character and mood (plot less so) - these were the American counterparts to Dubliners, though I didn't know that at all when I first read Winesburg, and saw also for the first time how stories, each in its own a small thing, could work together to create a much grander whole, the whole greater than the sum of its parts etc., in other words, it was my first experience with "linked stories," which has gone on to become first the staple and then the overwhelming cliche of graduate writing programs. In particular what Winesburg meant to me and I'm sure to many others was that there's material everywhere - you didn't have to live in NYC, Paris, or Moscow to be a serious writer. It made me think that, even in my dull suburban NJ town, there were many stories and that maybe I could write some of them. Sad that Anderson is now almost completely eclipsed in fame by his no doubt greater contemporaries - probably because he never wrote a great novel, and never progressed much beyond his original themes - but am glad to have a chance to go back to his work and see how it stands up - esp. in the Library of America edition, which old friend Charlie Baxter edited (to my surprise on picking up this vol. in the library). Initial impression is that the stories are very dated in some ways, a little over-wrought, a little obvious, but there's also no denying their emotional power - the sad story of the schoolteacher living in near isolation and under and assumed name after an accusation of fondling boys, the physician with almost no patients who tells his life story to the young reporter, Willard. Willard is of course the authorial stand-in, and we see this all through his eyes (though he is not the narrator) - it is pretty obvious that he will become the aged writer that we meet in the prologue to these stories. He's also the one every young reader and aspiring writer (e.g., me at age 15) identified with - the listener, the chronicler, the one who would maybe get away.