Winesburg, Ohio and Spoon River Anthology: A Comparison

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 pa

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doing something else. Now this opinion of Spoon River Anthology is not universal. Wrenn and Wrenn cite Masters's traditionalism, not social iconoclasm: "Masters in Spoon River is a proponent of traditional Jeffersonian values, strictly heterosexual relationships, and Christian love . . . and a salvation determined by one's conduct in this life" (55). Masters's strong moral sense does not prevent him from revealing truths of disappointment, often squalid and often concealed during life, that were conditioned by the environment of Spoon River. Nor does death bring clarity or good judgment; there is a persistent ignorance of the concealed truths of others, so preoccupied are the dead with their own experience. Consider the self-satisfaction with which Reverend Wiley says he saved the Blisses from divorce (113); Mrs. Bliss recalls nothing but bitterness within a family that took sides after she decided to remain in her loveless marriage (111). Winesburg, Ohio makes no poetic invocation to the muse, but White (8-9) says that Anderson did attempt to construct the work in a way that departed from the formulaic narrative structure of O. Henry and from the sentimental realism of William Dean Howells. As such, the stories in Winesburg, Oh
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Some common words found in the essay are:
River Anthology, Winesburg Ohio, Spoon River, George Willard, Masters's Cassius, George Willard's, Helen White, George Helen, Tom King, Enoch Robinson's, spoon river, spoon river anthology, river anthology, winesburg ohio, edgar lee, wrenn wrenn, george willard, small-town life, life spoon river, life spoon, york collier/macmillan 1962, lee masters, quiet desperation, edgar lee masters, masters's spoon river,
Approximate Word count = 2978
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)