ABSTRACT
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) appeared exactly one hundred years after the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketchbook. In the intervening period the short story changed fundamentally, from a folktale or romance genre to a realistic form that communicates meaning primarily by carefully patterned detail rather than by anecdotal events told in a linear fashion. Yet the short story never fully forgot its mythic-romantic background. During the forty years following Winesburg, Ohio the form evolved by means of a competitive interrelationship between the formal methods of Chekhovian realism and the romance themes of Hawthorne and Poe transplanted into the twentieth-century milieu. This basic duality can be seen in the difference between Hemingway's radical extension of Chekhov's ironic understatement and William Faulkner's creation of a selfcontained mythic world; between Katherine Anne Porter's tightly structured Joycean explorations of the meaning of memory and Eudora Welty's creation of a fairy tale-like "season of dreams"; between John Cheever's controlled evocation of the
world of the suburban middle class and Flannery O'Connor's moral romances of the rural South.
