Birth of Edgar Lee Masters 

Poet Edgar Lee Masters was born on August 23, 1868, in Garnett, Kansas. Decades later, memories of the Illinois towns where he grew up would supply the people, places, and tensions behind his best-known work, Spoon River Anthology.

Masters was the son of attorney Hardin Wallace Masters and Emma Dexter Masters. His family returned to Illinois while he was still very young, first living near Petersburg and later settling in Lewistown. He graduated from Lewistown High School in 1886. The town’s Oak Hill Cemetery, the nearby Spoon River, and the people he encountered in western Illinois would remain vivid in his memory.

In 1889, Masters entered Knox Academy, a preparatory school associated with Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He studied there for about a year but left when his family could no longer afford the expense. He then returned to Lewistown and studied law in his father’s office. Masters was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1891 and soon moved to Chicago.

His legal career became successful. He entered a law partnership in 1893 and later worked with noted attorney Clarence Darrow from 1903 to 1911. Law exposed Masters to disputes over money, marriage, reputation, politics, and crime. Many of those subjects also appeared in his writing.

Masters had been writing since his youth, but he worried that literary work might harm his standing as a lawyer. He sometimes published under pseudonyms, including Dexter Wallace, a name drawn from his mother’s maiden name and his father’s middle name. His first poetry collection, A Book of Verses, appeared under his own name in 1898.

The turning point came through William Marion Reedy, editor of the St. Louis literary magazine Reedy’s Mirror. Masters had been considering a work about the people of a small Illinois community. Through Reedy, he became familiar with J. W. Mackail’s Selected Epigrams from the Greek Anthology. The ancient Greek collection included short epitaphs in which the dead seemed to speak from their graves. Masters realized that this form could give his imaginary townspeople their own voices.

Beginning in May 1914, Reedy’s Mirror published Masters’ new poems under the pseudonym Webster Ford. Each poem was spoken by a deceased resident of the fictional town of Spoon River. From the cemetery, the speakers could tell stories they had hidden while alive. They confessed failed marriages, secret ambitions, crimes, disappointments, prejudices, and private acts of courage. Some speakers contradicted one another, allowing readers to see the same people and events from different viewpoints.

The poems attracted attention quickly. Poetry magazine reprinted several in 1914, and writers and critics, including Ezra Pound, took notice. In 1915, Macmillan published the poems as Spoon River Anthology under Masters’ real name. The collection contained more than 200 free-verse epitaphs and challenged idealized pictures of peaceful small-town life. Its characters included doctors, judges, soldiers, ministers, farmers, business owners, children, and people living on the margins of society.

Spoon River Anthology became an immediate popular and critical success. Its direct language and frank treatment of hypocrisy, sexuality, corruption, domestic unhappiness, and social pressure were unusual for the period. The book also helped draw attention to the Midwestern writers associated with the Chicago literary renaissance.

Masters continued writing for decades but never again matched the popularity of Spoon River Anthology. His later work included poetry, plays, novels, essays, and biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman. He eventually left law to devote himself to writing full time.

Masters died on March 5, 1950, in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, at age 81. He was buried in Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois, returning in death to the region that had inspired his most enduring literary creation.

Click here to read some of Masters’ poetry.

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