Later in life, Masters also tried his hand at fiction and biography, penning the novel Mitch Miller (1920) and biographies Whitman (1937) and the controversial Lincoln: The Man (1931), in addition to Mark Twain: A Portrait (1938). He died in 1950 in Melrose, Pennsylvania, and is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois.

JEROME LOVING, a recipient of the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships for biography, is Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University. His previous publications include Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story; Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself; and The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser.


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First published in the United States of America by The Macmillan Company 1915
This edition with an introduction and notes by Jerome Loving published in Penguin Books 2008

Introduction and notes copyright © Jerome Loving, 2008


All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Masters, Edgar Lee, 1868-1950.
Spoon River anthology / Edgar Lee Masters ; introduction and notes by Jerome Loving.
p. cm.
“First published in the United States of America by The Macmillan Company 1915.”
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-0-143-10515-2


1. Loving, Jerome, 1941- II. Title.
PS3525.A83S5 2008
811’.52—dc22 2008003519

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ed Folsom, Hilary Masters, J. Lawrence Mitchell, and Paul Christensen for reading a draft of my introduction and making helpful suggestions.

Introduction

In the summer of 1915, Theodore Dreiser held a reception for Edgar Lee Masters at his Greenwich Village apartment. The two writers had known each other for at least three years. Dreiser, the “Father of American Realism” (or at least naturalism), was already famous for five or six books, most notably Sister Carrie, which in 1900 set the stage for novels and poetry that would envision life as a biological trap. Dreiser had blazed the trail in fiction that Masters followed in poetry. Indeed, by that summer the Chicago lawyer and former partner with Clarence Darrow was possibly more famous than the great Dreiser. Spoon River Anthology (1915) immediately became a huge literary splash. Its sales for the next three or four years made it America’s all-time best-seller for a serious book of poems.

Ever since the short poems began appearing in 1914 in the St. Louis weekly Reedy’s Mirror, the excitement about this new poet had been mounting. By the time it reached book form in the spring of 1915, Spoon River had gone through seven printings in the same number of months. “At last,” Ezra Pound announced from England in the Egoist, “America has discovered a poet.” He ranked Masters with T. S. Eliot, who had recently published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” On March 4, 1914, the Literary Digestwrote: “Not since the British discovered Walt Whitman for America and blamed us for our in-appreciation, has an American literary sensation struck England with the impact of ‘Spoon River Anthology.’”

The Spoon River poems initially appeared under the pseudonym Webster Ford. Masters, steeped in English literature as well as the Roman and Greek classics, had combined the surnames of two major dramatists of the English Renaissance known for their tragic themes: John Webster and John Ford. Now all the world knew the true identity of the author of the famous Spoon River epitaphs, lapidary, or tombstone verse that may have been inspired in part by such nineteenth-century works as E. W. Howe’s The Story of a Country Town (1883) and Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899), stories that suggested the hypocrisy and superficiality of a small-town environment. On the other side of the spectrum, Spoon River Anthology, with its theme of the buried life, would open the way to such penetrating psychological works in the twentieth century as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920), and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), the principal monuments of a phase of American fiction known as “The Revolt from the Village” (1915-30).