This research will examine Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, with a focus on the narrative of tension between the culture of small-town America and the culture of the wide world, and the bias both Anderson and Masters appear to have toward the latter rather than the former. The research will set forth the context in which the narrative pattern of each of the works emerges and discuss the pattern of ideas of each work in general terms, together with the means by which the theme of felt tension in (and advocacy of escape from) the narrowness of small-town life is developed in each.
Spoon River Anthology and Winesburg, Ohio are roughly contemporary literary works and similar in several ways, both as publishing products and as observed records of their milieu. Each work takes as its subtext the personalities and sensibilities of small-town life in an American Midwest that both, as natives of Midwestern small towns, knew very well. Winesburg, Ohio, as a locale is a complete geographical fiction, having its analogue in Anderson's hometown of Clyde, Ohio. Spoon River is a fictional town derived from the Illinois river that lies east of Galesburg, Illinois, where Masters lived and for a time practiced law (with Clarence Darrow).
What Masters and Anderson share apart from their provincial roots is a view, often bleak and sometime despairing, of what Thoreau might have called lives of quiet desperation. Burbank, indeed, sees a direct parallel between Thoreau's comment and Anderson's description of the "terrible loneliness" of the great mass of men (Burbank 46). A mood of bleakness is a given of Spoon River Anthology inasmuch as its literary conceit is that it is a collection of epitaphs of the deceased of Spoon River who are buried on The Hill.
These deceased do not rest in peace, and by and large no hope springs eternal. Rather, Masters's dead are a proxy for the dark side of life, oft...