Sherwood Anderson

Twenty-two lives in one Ohio town, seen through a young reporter who will leave and a doctor who never did: the unmarried teacher, the man with the beautiful hands, the woman who married the wrong brother. Anderson walked out of his own paint factory mid-sentence at thirty-six and never went back; he called these people grotesques - not monsters, but ordinary people bent by one truth held too long.
It changed the American short story.