A helpful general statement about Anderson's puzzled, confused, answer-seeking characters (generally male), of whom the central figure in "The Other Woman" is an example, may be found in Sherwood Anderson: Short Stories, edited and with an introduction by Maxwell Geismar (1962). Anderson, in writing "The Dumb Man" (a poem in prose, a la Walt Whitman's prose poetry), included in the 1923 collection The Triumph of the Egg, was—according to Geismar—like Theodore Dreiser in this particular regard. He "had deliberately chosen the role of the puzzled and baffled spectator standing in awe before all the mysteries of life. That was the typical role of the whole new generation of native realists who had come of age in the 1900s and the 'teens and who opened up the road for that 'sophistication' which marked the literature of the twenties."

As to "The Other Woman" and its...