Across Spoon River

The memoirs of one of Illinois’ great poets, author of Spoon River Anthology, with many vignettes of the Chicago Renaissance. This intimate and provocative autobiography, first published in 1936, reveals the innermost thoughts of a great American poet. Edgar Lee Masters was a transitional figure in American literature with one foot planted in the nineteenth century and the other firmly placed on the path of what we now think of as the modern period. Richly illustrated throughout with black and white photographs. “Across Spoon River: An Autobiography is blunt and cranky about a life [Masters] saw as largely “scrappy and unmanageable.” Emphasizing life on his grandfather’s farm, his school days, his political battles, the workday world, and the growth of a poet’s mind through wide reading, the book is a valuable record of Masters’s work habits and offers considerable insight on his position as a critic and his place in American literature.”—Ronald Primeau, American National Biography

From Main Street to Stranger Things, how poetry changed our idea of small town life A literary and cultural milestone, Spoon River Anthology captured an idea of the rural Midwest that became a bedrock myth of life in small-town America. Jason Stacy places the book within the atmosphere of its time and follows its progress as the poetry took root and thrived. Published by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915, Spoon River Anthology won praise from modernists while becoming an ongoing touchstone for American popular culture. Stacy charts the ways readers embraced, debated, and reshaped Masters's work in literary controversies and culture war skirmishes; in films and other media that over time saw the small town as idyllic then conflicted then surreal; and as the source of three archetypes—populist, elite, and exile—that endure across the landscape of American culture in the twenty-first century. A wide-ranging reconsideration of a literary landmark, Spoon River America tells the story of how a Midwesterner's poetry helped change a nation's conception of itself.

Bonded Leather binding

A CLASSIC IN AMERICAN POETRY... When Spoon River Anthology was published in 1915 it garnered immediate national attention for its truth and its shocking transgression of societal mores. A collection of poems from the graveyard of a rural Illinois town, Spoon River Anthology poignantly captures the politics, love, betrayals, alliances, hopes, and failures of this small American town. Here is the respected doctor, jailed for swindling; here is the chaste wife, rapt with desire; here is the pastor, angry and resentful; here is the quiet man, filled with unrequited love and devotion. Beneath the midwestern values of honesty, community, family, hard work, and chastity, Spoon River Anthology reveals the disillusionment and corruption in modern life. With the publication of Spoon River Anthology Masters exploded the powerful myth that small-town America was a social utopia. Here for the first time was a community that people recognized in its wholeness and complexity. Comprised of distinctly modern poems that collectively read as a novel, Spoon River Anthology is the story of a quiet midwestern town whose truths and contradictions are celebrated by its dead.

Growing up poor in the 1940's farming along the Spoon River, the Wallick children learned to look out for each other, using their imaginations and playfulness to soften the edges of lives filled with hard work and an alcoholic parent, escaping to the safety of the woods, streams, and river whenever possible. The adventures of Chuck, his seven siblings, and neighborhood kids galore in the countryside and farmstead capture the innocent, but often dangerous, mischief of the time. The facts of the stories told are as true as memories allow with just the details filled in with imagination and seasoned by the flavors of the land. Chuck Wallick came close to getting killed many times over his life, ten by my count with more than once the others present as witness thinking he was sure enough dead. Other times things were close to going the other way and might have easy enough. That I am his son and passing on his stories as told me is something of a spoiler, but the protagonist of these stories survives and makes it through his trials having lived fuller than most and with stories matched by only a few.

Drawn from all of Edgar Lee Masters's diaries correspondence, and the unpublished chapters of his 1936 autobiography, this is the first full-length biography of the celebrated author of "Spoon River Anthology", one of the most widely read and discussed volumes of poetry ever written in America. 25 photos.

DIVAn American poetry classic, in which former citizens of a mythical midwestern town speak touchingly from the grave of the thwarted hopes and dreams of their lives. /div