be repelled and humiliated by her beau, the large-fisted bartender, Ed Handby. The climax of George's sexual and artistic coming-of-age comes in the second-to-last story of the collection, "Sophistication". Early in the story, while walking amongst the crowds of the Winesburg County Fair, George felt "...a thing known to men and unknown to boys. He felt old and little tired...[and]...he wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother's death [an event that took place in, "Death,” the previous story]". That someone turned out to be Helen White, who herself had "...come to a period of change". It is in the time they spend together that readers see "his acceptance of Helen as a spiritual mediator..." which signifies that "...George's masculinity is balanced by the feminine qualities of tenderness and gentleness, an integration that Anderson suggests is necessary for the artist." Style The style of Winesburg, Ohio has often been placed at various points in the spectrum between the naturalism of Anderson's literary predecessor, William Dean Howells (who died almost one year after the publication of the book), contemporaries Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, and the Modernist writers of the Lost Generation. In what has been dubbed a "New Realism", Winesburg, Ohio surpasses the notion of the novel as an "objective report" by making use of "lyrical, nostalgic, evocative," even sentimental effects of nineteenth-century novels in its depictions of what lies beneath the psychological surface of a midwestern town. In the book, Anderson reoriented the facts typical of realist novels by incorporating his characters' inner beliefs about themselves as part of "reality". The symbolism in Winesburg, Ohio plays a large role in allowing for this reorientation. Beginning with the idea of characters as grotesques whose "...grotesqueness is not merely a shield of deformity; it is also a remnant of misshapen feelings, what Dr. Reefy in the sketch 'Paper Pills' calls 'the sweetness of the twisted apples'". The irony of the sweet, but twisted (meaning, in the sentimental Victorian tradition, internally inferior), apples is that they are compared to Dr. Reefy's own knuckles that make a habit of stuffing crumpled notes bearing his thoughts unread into his pockets (itself a symbol of the "ineffectuality of human thought"). Wing Biddlebaum, the subject of the story "Hands", likewise was "...forever striving to conceal [his hands] in his pockets or behind his back". For Wing, his hands were