Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography

　　This is the first book-length biography of Edgar Lee Masters, author of the celebrated Spoon River Anthology, one of the most widely read and discussed volumes of poetry ever written in America.

　　Like Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and the other "prairie poets," Masters (1868-1950) left his small midwestern hometown for Chicago in the hope of becoming a successful writer. He was a family man and a partner in Clarence Darrow's Chicago law firm -- writing on the side -- when, at the age of forty-six, his boyhood dream of literary success suddenly came true. His Spoon River Anthology, a series of monologues spoken by the dead in a midwestern cemetery, became a literary sensation overnight. Castigated by some critics for its "shredded prose" and offensive subject matter, Spoon River Anthology was hailed by others as a watershed in American poetry: a direct, unsentimental, realistic treatment of the blood, grit, and pathos of life in middle America. It was Masters's only lasting success.