Spoon River Anthology (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Edgar Lee Masters and Eric Carl Link

Every character in Spoon River Anthology is dead.  And the dead speak.  In Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology the speakers lie together in a hillside graveyard in a small, rural community in central Illinois.  As they moulder in their earthen tombs, they spill forth their secrets to the living.  From its first appearance (in serial form) in the pages of William Marion Reedy’s Mirror in 1914, the American literary world had not seen anything quite like Spoon River Anthology, and the world has yet to see its true successor, despite its influence and imitators.  The Spoon River dead speak for all of us, and their secrets are the hidden things that prick at the hearts of each of us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411429031

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar LeeMasters (1868–1950) was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. Born in Garnett, Kansas to attorney Hardin Wallace Masters and Emma Jerusha Dexter, they later moved to Lewistown, Illinois, where Masters attended high school and had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News. After working in his father’s law office, he was admitted to the Illinois State Bar and moved to Chicago. In 1898 he married Helen M. Jenkins and had three children. Masters died on March 5, 1950, in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, at the age of eighty-one. He is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois.

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