SOURCE: “Spoon River Anthology: An Introduction,” in Midamerica, Vol. 7, 1980, pp. 52-72.

In the following essay, Narveson provides an overview of major themes in Spoon River.

The years just before the first world war are relatively barren ones for American literature. Among novelists, Crane and Norris were dead, Howells and Mark Twain were past their prime, Dreiser was silenced for most of a decade by the quasi-suppression of Sister Carrie; both James and Wharton were living out of the country, and the strongest voices on the domestic scene were rebels and reformers such as Jack London and Upton Sinclair, whose talents for literature were less strong than their commitment to the social causes of the Progressive era. As for the poets, Frost, Eliot, and Pound were learning their craft in obscurity, while Robinson's finest work was appearing under adverse conditions and finding little response. In 1912, however, the founding of...