Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson (OUP, £6.99 in UK)

It is a little hard today to understand why this slim book of short stories created such a stir and was/is considered a landmark in American literature; but incontrovertibly it did and was. Even Hemingway for a time was so influenced bye Anderson that he only exorcised this by mercilessly parodying him in Torrents of Spring. Like Edward Lee Masters in poetry, Anderson virtually discovered or invented the lid-off-a-small-town genre, depicting "ordinary" people who were not folksy good neighbours, but often misfits, grotesques, men and women leading double lives. His prose is a little stiff, and as a literary artist he is rather short of subtlety or shading, yet the book remains much more than a museum piece.