Edgar Lee Masters was born in 1868 in Garnett, Kansas, and spent his childhood in the small Illinois towns of Petersburg and Lewistown — places where everyone knew each other and the dead outnumbered the living. This upbringing left a lasting impression on him. He trained as a lawyer and spent decades practicing in Chicago, but he never fully embraced the courtroom. Instead, he was always writing on the side: plays, essays, poems, and political broadsides.
The work that changed everything for him was released in 1915. *Spoon River Anthology* is a collection of free-verse epitaphs, each narrated by a resident of the fictional Spoon River cemetery. The dead reveal the truths of their lives — the affairs, failures, quiet contentments, and unspoken bitterness they carried while alive. The book became a sensation. At that time, American poetry was still heavily rooted in genteel sentiment and formal verse, and here was Masters giving voice to a drunkard, a banker, a fiddler, a judge, and a suicide, one after another, allowing each to air their grievances. The book went through countless printings and made Masters the most discussed poet in the country for a while.
“He never quite recaptured that success, and he was aware of it.”
He continued to write — prolifically and almost obsessively. Throughout his life, he published twelve plays, twenty-one poetry collections, six novels, and six biographies, featuring portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman. His biography of Lincoln was notably critical and stirred significant controversy, while his Whitman biography was more affectionate. However, none of his later works resonated with the culture like *Spoon River* did.
In his later years, Masters lived in New York, increasingly impoverished and out of trend. The literary scene had shifted to Eliot, Pound, and the modernists, and Masters — who had once seemed avant-garde — now appeared as a relic of regionalism. He passed away in 1950 in a Pennsylvania nursing home, largely overlooked by the mainstream media, although *Spoon River Anthology* remained in print.
