# Winesburg, Ohio — Character guide

> Key figures in Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.

- [George Willard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/george_willard.md): George Willard moves through Winesburg as its newspaperman and its connective tissue, the one figure many of the town's isolated souls trust enough to speak to. Wing Biddlebaum's hands grow calm in his presence; others s
- [Jesse Bentley](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/jesse_bentley.md): Jesse Bentley takes over the Bentley farm as a slight, minister-like young man and drives everyone around him into fearful obedience, including a delicate wife who does not survive the labor he permits. He is half strong
- [Louise Bentley](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/louise_bentley.md): Louise grows up on the Bentley farm under a father whose fanaticism leaves no room for tenderness, and she inherits his intensity without his purpose. Her marriage to John Hardy and her life as a farmer's wife become ano
- [Seth Richmond](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/seth_richmond.md): Seth Richmond puzzles his anxious mother, Virginia, by refusing to weep or tremble under scolding, meeting her instead with a steady gaze she cannot read. He runs away with two boys to a fair and sticks it out for his ow
- [Tom Foster](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/tom_foster.md): Tom Foster does odd jobs around town, sleeps in a cast-off fur coat, and finds absurd happiness in the smell of roasting coffee at Hern's Grocery. His grandmother dotes on him and scrubs the lawyer's office where he rent
- [Alice Hindman](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/alice_hindman.md): Alice Hindman gives herself to Ned Currie before he leaves for Cleveland, and she holds to the idea of him long after he has stopped writing. As she reaches twenty-five and then twenty-seven, she joins the Methodist chur
- [David Hardy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/david_hardy.md): David Hardy is the grandson of Jesse Bentley, raised in the shadow of his grandfather's religious fervor and the family's tangled history. Like his mother Louise before him, he carries a restless impulse that cannot be c
- [Elmer Cowley](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/elmer_cowley.md): Elmer Cowley lives in Winesburg as an outsider among outsiders, desperate to shed the strangeness he feels clinging to him. His father's odd habits and the family's reputation only deepen his isolation, and his attempts 
- [Joe Welling](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/joe_welling.md): Joe Welling moves through Winesburg's stores and offices with excessive politeness, a man his neighbors watch with amusement tempered by alarm. When an idea takes hold, his personality becomes gigantic and overrides ever
- [Enoch Robinson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/enoch_robinson.md): Enoch Robinson left Winesburg for art school and fifteen years in a long narrow room facing Washington Square, where talking artists gathered and he sat silent in a corner. He never grew up, and the child in him kept bum
- [Wash Williams](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/wash_williams.md): Wash Williams sits in his dirty telegraph office by day and drinks unbelievable quantities of beer by night, hating women with the same abandon he once loved his young wife. He keeps his hands clean and shapely, still pr
- [Helen White](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/helen_white.md): Helen White returns to Winesburg from Cleveland for the Fair, well dressed and restless, aware that her months in the city have remade her. She wants George Willard to feel that change and to walk with her again as they 
- [Elizabeth Willard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/elizabeth_willard.md): George Willard's mother, who married into the New Willard House and now moves through its halls like a woman who left her real life somewhere behind her.
- [Ray Pearson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/ray_pearson.md): A farmhand who once dreamed of going west to sea or to saddle, and now runs through the cornfields trying to stop a younger man from repeating his life.
- [Kate Swift](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/kate_swift.md): The schoolteacher whose evening lamp and bare shoulders draw the minister's gaze, and whose fierce, unspent passion seeks an outlet in George Willard.
- [Tom Willard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/tom_willard.md): Proprietor of the New Willard House, a man whose loud claims for the hotel and for his son George never quite cover the gap between boast and fact.
- [Wing Biddlebaum](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/wing_biddlebaum.md): A berry picker whose restless, expressive hands—famous for picking a hundred and forty quarts a day—betray a terror he has spent twenty years trying to hide.
- [Doctor Parcival](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/doctor_parcival.md): A fat, unclean doctor with few patients and mysterious money, who corners the young reporter George Willard with tales that begin nowhere and end nowhere.
- [Hal Winters](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/hal_winters.md): Hal Winters works the fields around Winesburg but dreams of going West to sea or to ride shouting into strange towns. His careless bravado collides with Ray Pearson's panic over the same woman, Nell, and the children nei
- [Doctor Reefy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/doctor_reefy.md): Doctor Reefy practices medicine from a musty office above the Paris Dry Goods store, wearing one frayed suit for a decade and pelting his only friend with the hard paper balls of his thoughts. He builds little pyramids o
- [Adolph Myers](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/adolph_myers.md): Wing Biddlebaum's former identity as a teacher in Pennsylvania.
- [Belle Carpenter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/belle_carpenter.md): Young woman who works in a store and dates Ed Handby.
- [Ed Handby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/ed_handby.md): Bartender who competes with George Willard for Belle Carpenter.
- [Ned Currie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/ned_currie.md): Young man who leaves Winesburg and Alice Hindman behind.
- [Virginia Richmond](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/virginia_richmond.md): Seth Richmond's mother, a widow who runs a farm.
- [John Hardy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/john_hardy.md): Banker who marries Louise Bentley, father of David.
- [Albert Hardy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/albert_hardy.md): Son of John Hardy, brother of David.
- [Windpeter Winters](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/windpeter_winters.md): Hal Winters' father, a violent drunkard killed in a train accident.
- [Will Henderson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/will_henderson.md): Editor of the Winesburg Eagle, George Willard's boss.
- [Hop Higgins](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/hop_higgins.md): Town night watchman who patrols the streets.
- [Wesley Moyer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/wesley_moyer.md): Young man who works at the livery stable.
- [Aunt Elizabeth Swift](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/aunt_elizabeth_swift.md): Kate Swift's aunt, who raised her.
- [Art Wilson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters/art_wilson.md): Young man who works at the livery stable.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/winesburg_ohio_se/characters