Spoon River America

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.

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

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

Drawn from all of Edgar Lee Masters's diaries correspondence, and the unpublished chapters of his 1936 autobiography, this is the first full-length biography of the celebrated author of "Spoon River Anthology", one of the most widely read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

“A fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.”—The Wall Street Journal The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties that bind a community. In his first novel in 30 years, David Rhodes offers a vivid and unforgettable look at life in small-town America. “[Rhodes’s] finest work yet . . . Driftless is the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.”—Chicago Tribune “Set in a rural Wisconsin town, the book presents a series of portraits that resemble Edgar Lee Masters’s ‘Spoon River Anthology’ in their vividness and in the cumulative picture they create of village life.”—The New Yorker “Encompassing and incisive, comedic and profound, Driftless is a radiant novel of community and courage.”—Booklist (starred review) “A welcome antidote to overheated urban fiction . . . A quiet novel of depth and simplicity.”—Kirkus Reviews “It takes a while for all these stories to kick in, but once they do, Rhodes shows he still knows how to keep readers riveted. Add a blizzard, a marauding cougar and some rabble-rousing militiamen, and the result is a novel that is as affecting as it is pleasantly overstuffed.”—Publishers Weekly

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Academic Writing 1, language: English, abstract: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history” (Lincoln 537). This popular statement made by Abraham Lincoln represents a universal truth. Edgar Lee Masters’ work Spoon River Anthology strongly sticks to this idea. The collection of poems illustrates the point of view of deceased citizens contemplating about their lives in the fictional town Spoon River. Many late-citizens are fictional while some others, like William H. Herndon, Hannah Armstrong and Anne Rutledge, have clear similarities to real persons. It will be shown that Masters borrowed the concepts of these three characters from history and that Abraham Lincoln is the link between reality and fiction.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

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.