• Hand in a thoughtful and thorough essay with perfect grammar and beautiful prose in answer to one of the following questions. Your essay should be no shorter than five pages--and that is five pages to the bottom of page five. This essay is due at the beginning of class on the date specified on the syllabus, Friday, 5 February 2010.
   
• I encourage you to work with each other on this exam. Discuss the book among yourselves, and talk through your essays.
   
• Do not plagiarize each other’s exams, however. If you do, both of you will be asked to rewrite your papers, and a penalty may be assessed. If you plagiarize from the book, you will also have to rewrite your paper, and a penalty may be assessed.
   
• Direct quotes from the book must be inside quotation marks. The page number from whence the quote came must be noted in parenthesis after the period (that is, outside of the sentence). The Scots Guide contains the College’s plagiarism policy, which I follow strictly.
   
• If you have any questions at all, call me, e-mail me, or stop by my office. I will be happy to look at a draft of your essay. I’ll be happy to look at your thesis statement, or your outline, or your opening paragraph--whatever will help you to write a really excellent essay.
   
• This is a 40 point exam.

Hints:

• The more specific information contained in your exam, the better.
• I need to know that you've read the entire book.
• You do not need a cover sheet or a folder or a bibliography, as you will only have one source.
• Grammar, spelling, punctuation, and syntax all count.
• Please see option #4 below for an example of how to cite in this exam.
• Please put the option number of your essay on your exam somewhere.
• Make sure you ALWAYS underline or italicize the title of the book. In this way, you will differentiate between the title and the town.

Option #1. Consult your textbook to gather a sense of Progressive Era America.  Consider the economic climate and the social changes underway, for starters.  Then write an essay that compares the town of Winesburg, Ohio, as portrayed by Sherwood Anderson, to the textbook view of that era.

Option #2. You are George Willard.  Write your autobiography.

Option #3. Winesburg, Ohio, is a town full of people yearning.  Write an essay that  analyzes the dreams, hopes, fears, and strivings of the townspeople.  Conclude with a paragraph or two (no more than that) that attemps to place these yearnings in the context of 1919 America.

Option #4. In his afterword, novelist Dean Koontz wrote that "The people of Winesburg, Ohio are not true grotesques as much as they are eccentrics." (259) I want you to ignore this!  Instead, take Sherwood Anderson at his own self-assessment when he wrote that all the characters in his book were grotesques, and it was "the truths that made the people grotesque." (6)  Write an essay that explores what Anderson meant by "grotesque" and how his characters embraced or displayed this notion of the grotesque.