20 pages • 40 minutes read
Edgar Lee MastersGeorge Gray
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
Much like the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, which established the vitality and relevance of Black artists to an international audience, the Chicago Literary Renaissance, of which Masters was a leading voice, defined the importance and relevance of Midwestern life in America. For more than 10 years leading up to World War One, a gathering of writers, artists, playwrights, journalists, composers, and photographers dedicated themselves to capturing the realities of life in a Midwestern culture being compelled to abandon its rural roots and find an entirely new identity within an urban environment.
The movement had its initial conception around 1893 when Chicago hosted an international exposition to commemorate the anniversary of the voyages of Columbus. For months, intelligentsia from around the world flocked to Chicago, and in the process resident artists began to perceive the changing nature of the Midwest. Working against the idealistic stereotype of a bucolic rural world whose residents maintained a strong work ethic, clear family identities, and stabilizing religious grounding, the members of the emerging Chicago Renaissance were determined to reveal a more honest definition of the peoples and cultures of the changing Midwest.
These writers, most from small Midwestern towns—in addition to Masters, Carl Sandberg, Vachel Lindsay, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson—committed themselves to unflinching realism. Pioneering literary magazines, most notably Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, provided writers with a forum to share their sobering depictions of small-town Midwestern America. With the advent of World War One and then the catastrophic careen into the Great Depression, the Chicago Renaissance lost its momentum. Spoon River Anthology, along with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, are recognized now as the finest literary achievements of this short-lived movement.
Literary Context
Masters’ character of the quiet, unprepossessing man who realizes too late that his life passed him by anticipates what will become a dominant literary type in the early decades of the 20th century. The figure would be most notably embodied in a poem published just 11 months after Spoon River appeared: T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” An interior monologue, the poem tells of a pretentious Harvard graduate student named Al Prufrock who has aspirations to be a poet (he dreams of publishing important poems under the magisterial name J. Alfred Prufrock). Al is on his way to an afternoon tea party with, presumably, other pretentious intellectuals. As he approaches the party, however, he begins to panic, terrified of even the idea of conversations with pretty women and smart men. He sees his life is crushingly unimportant and glimpses the magnitude of his own pretentiousness. He sees his thwarted ambitions and his lost dreams. In the end, he caves in to his fears over his own insignificance and never even gets to the party.
Prufrock’s perception of his own lost opportunities for love, fame, and his own disturbing questions over his timid lack of assertion, in turn, created a character type of almost entirely middle-aged males that recurs in numerous literary settings, most notably Nick Carraway (Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), Seth Richmond (Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio), Francis Macomber (Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”), Quentin Compson (William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stories), and the nebbish characters in the midcentury novels of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. George Gray, speaking from the grave, reveals the cost of a life wasted on opportunities deliberately avoided, one defined in the end by both paralysis and longing.
