And while today Masters is no longer considered Whitman’s literary equal, he is in fact just as important as a literary innovator. Whereas Whitman, in the words of Ezra Pound, “broke the new wood” of poetry by writing about the miracle of the common in free verse, Masters opened up the naturalistic tradition in American literature. Indeed, it is Masters instead of Sherwood Anderson who was the first American writer to introduce psychological naturalism. In the earlier form of naturalism, adversity comes from external forces such as poverty, crime, or sickness, whereas in psychological naturalism the enemy is as much within as without, indeed more so.

As the village or small town began to reappear in American literature, whether as Spoon River or Winesburg, it was no longer viewed as a refuge from the brute external forces found in the city. The voices that speak in Spoon River Anthology describe themselves as victims of their own hunger for life and its consequences. “There are two hundred and forty-four characters in the book . . . nineteen stories developed by interrelated portraits,” Masters wrote in “The Genesis of Spoon River.” “Practically every human occupation is covered.” He anticipated works featuring the revolt from the village, not only in Lewis’s Main Street but Anderson’s Winesburg,Ohio, where Doc Reefy in “Paper Pills” is clearly anticipated by Masters’s “Doc Hill,” based in part on the Masterses’ family physician. Wilder’s play Our Town not only takes the idea of the living dead directly from Spoon River Anthology, but borrows a line from “Lucinda Matlock” and credits Masters not by name but as merely “one of those Middle West poets.”

“I am robbed all the time,” the aging poet complained to Gerald Sanders, a would-be compiler of his primary bibliography at Eastern Michigan College, in 1941. By this time Masters had already given his all for poetry (and the accompanying ego). He had divorced his first wife, moved permanently to New York City in 1923, married a woman thirty years his junior the following year, sired a son (the writer Hilary Masters) by her in 1928, and lived a nearly hand-to-mouth existence at the Chelsea, then a cheap residential hotel for artists and writers at 222 West Twenty-third Street in New York. By this time he had become, or resembled, one of the vanquished in his Spoon River Anthology. In one of the final epitaphs of “Webster Ford,” he had alluded to the challenges of heredity and environment—“When I seemed to be turned to a tree with trunk and branches / Growing indurate, turning to stone, yet burgeoning[.]” He was eking out an existence from his writing, never coming close to his earlier economic success in literature (not to mention the law) except for the brief popularity of The New Spoon River in 1924. Spoon River Anthology, the play based on the 1915 work that continues to be performed by high school and college thespians today, did not debut on Broadway until the late 1960s, long after Masters’s death.

By the beginning of World War II, Masters had been eclipsed by such contemporary poets as Edwin Arlington Robinson and especially Robert Frost, whose first three books had originally been overshadowed by Spoon River Anthology. Masters came to despise Louis Untermeyer, an editor of poetry anthologies and a minor poet who vigorously promoted Frost over Masters. Masters believed that most Eastern poets were in a natural conspiracy against the bards of the Midwest. He had become embittered at the decline of his reputation and saddened at the lack of collegiality he expected from fellow poets, something he himself didn’t always extend to others. He thought he would be welcomed into the parliament of poets that Keats and Shelley wrote about, his son told this writer in 2006, but he found ultimately only “ridicule and frosty responses.” “I have done nothing in my life that was not a service in the devotion to Apollo,” Masters told a friend in the 1920s, “since I was seventeen years of age.”

Hilary Masters, his last son, has written eloquently in Last Stands, a family memoir that has been called “something of a miniature Spoon River,” of his life growing up with the aging poet and his second wife, Ellen Coyne. Sixty when he became a father for the fourth time, Masters seldom saw his son afterward except in the summer when young Hilary was brought East from his maternal grandparents’ home in Kansas City. When the boy was eight years old, his father wrote him, “Perhaps, and this hurts, I should have given up writing, and devoted my time to you. That might have been a contribution to America better than I have made by isolating myself to do it. Who knows?” By this time, this “one-book author,” as he has been called, was the author of forty-four volumes. He wrote in every genre, even children’s literature in Mitch Miller (1920), the story about a boyhood friend who was killed while trying to hitch a ride on a train.

His autobiography, Across Spoon River, finally appeared in 1937, but most of it had been written in the 1920s and held back because of a lack of a publisher. Finally, Ellen Coyne helped prepare a copy that was publishable in the sense of not being too exact in its use of names and other details that might embarrass people still living. (In fact, Clarence Darrow, who was Masters’s law partner from 1903 to 1911, is never mentioned by name because the two became bitter enemies after Darrow served as the divorce lawyer for Helen Jenkins Masters.) The story it presents concludes in 1917, and in one way the life—the literary life—of Edgar Lee Masters came to an effective close at that point, at least in terms of any critical success approaching the magnitude of Spoon River Anthology. Nonetheless, he continued to produce a volume almost every year of his life. Masters wrote easily and eloquently, but unfortunately he wrote too fast—composing Mitch Miller, for example, in just under two weeks. He had also written Spoon River quickly (and the uneven quality is apparent even there), but the originality of those poems was now missing. Ironically, he had taken much more care in preparing his legal briefs, knowing perhaps that they would fall under heavier scrutiny than his more subjective literary work.

Edgar Lee Masters also wrote four biographies of American writers, two of which were warm appreciations of the figures and two of which were attacks. The subjects were (in the order of discussion) Vachel Lindsay, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and Mark Twain.