SOURCE: A review of Spoon River Anthology, in The New Republic, Vol. 207, No. 30, July 27, 1992, pp. 47-53.

In the following essay, Hollander presents an overview of the background and major themes of Spoon River, offering praise for the 1992 annotated edition of the collection.

Spoon River Anthology is one of those remarkable, seemingly sui generis American books, like William Carlos Williams's Spring and All, or John Dos Passos's U.S.A., which seem to mark milestones in the long, strange course of our country's effort to understand itself. It creates a fictional community through the short dramatic monologues spoken by its deceased inhabitants, rather than by overt description. The town is more like Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tilbury Town, and certainly more like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, than like Sinclair Lewis's Gopher Prairie (in Main Street) or Thornton Wilder's Our Town or, of course, Faulkner's Jefferson in his Yoknapatawpha County. Its...