Edgar Lee Masters
1868–1950
Biography
Edgar Lee Masters lived from 1868 to 1950. He was born in Garnett, Kansas, but grew up in Lewistown, Illinois, a small town near the Spoon River, after his family moved there in 1880. He trained as a lawyer, was admitted to the Illinois bar, and built a legal career in Chicago, where for several years he worked in partnership with the lawyer Clarence Darrow. Alongside the law he wrote poems, plays, novels and biographies, and his early poems and essays appeared under pen names.
Masters published more than twenty books of verse, as well as plays, novels and biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay and Walt Whitman. None of his later work matched the success of Spoon River Anthology, which appeared in 1915. That book is a sequence of short free-verse poems, each spoken by one of the dead buried in a small Illinois town. Together they reveal the secrets, hopes and resentments of a community. The town is fictional, though it draws on Lewistown and its cemetery.
Spoon River Anthology is the book on this site, and it is the reason Masters is still read. Its dead speakers give an unsparing account of small-town ambition, hypocrisy and disappointment, and the book drew both praise and hostility from critics when it appeared. Masters died in poverty in 1950, in a nursing home in Pennsylvania. He later described the making of the book in his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1939), and his place in American poetry rests largely on this one collection.
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Books
Spoon River Anthology
by Edgar Lee Masters
More than two hundred dead townspeople of Spoon River, Illinois, speak from the hillside cemetery and tell what their neighbours never knew, from the banker and the preacher to the drunk and the village atheist. Together their epitaphs make a harsh portrait of a small American…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.