Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950), American poet, known principally for his poems about life in the Midwest. Born in Garnett, Kansas, Masters attended Knox College for one year before studying law privately. He wrote A Book of Verses (1898) and several plays before gaining fame with Spoon River Anthology (1915), a collection of poems in free verse about the secret lives of the inhabitants of Spoon River, a small Midwestern town based on Lewistown and Petersburg, Illinois, where Masters lived during much of his childhood. In this volume Masters presents the poems as the voices of the occupants of the town's graveyard, talking honestly about their lives. Masters appropriated this technique from J. W. Mackail's book Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (1890). The realism and irony of Spoon River Anthology were in marked contrast to the prevailing romantic and sentimental trends in American literature, and the book remains a landmark in the literature of realism and revolt against conventional social standards that flourished in the early 20th century. Masters's other writings include Songs and Satires (1916), The New Spoon River (1924), Poems of People (1936), and The New World (1937); the novel Mitch Miller (1920); the biography Lincoln the Man (1931); and the autobiography Across Spoon River (1936).