| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Edgar Lee Masters |
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| Biography: Edgar Lee Masters |
Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950), American author and lawyer, is mainly remembered for his "Spoon River Anthology," a collection of free verse about small-town American life.
Edgar Lee Masters was born on Aug. 23, 1869, in Garnett, Kans. A year later his father's law practice failed and the family moved to the grandfather's Illinois farm. Edgar's father won appointment as state's attorney in Petersburg, and there the young boy started school. In 1880 the family moved to Lewistown near the Spoon River. Masters continued his schooling, worked in a printer's office, and reported for local newspapers. He read James Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Burns, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote poetry, and read law in his father's office. In 1889 he entered Knox College, but his father refused help, so he returned to law in Lewistown. Admitted to the bar in 1891, in 1892 he left for Chicago.
Masters entered a law partnership in 1893 and succeeded professionally, socially, and financially. He married Helen Jenkins in 1898 and published A Book of Verse. He was active in Democratic party politics, traveled west in 1904, and in 1906 toured Europe. He contributed to Reedy's Mirror and met novelist Theodore Dreiser. Masters's next two volumes - The Blood of the Prophets (1905) and Songs and Sonnets (1910) - were published under pseudonyms. Between 1907 and 1911 he wrote four plays. When his second law partner defaulted in 1910, Masters set up his own office. When Poetry magazine started publication in Chicago in 1912, he joined its coterie, meeting Carl Sandburg and others.
Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1915) drew on the values and frustrations of his youth in Lewistown, the style of the Greek Anthology, and contemporary experiments in free verse or rhythmical prose. In it, Masters reveals the spiritual impoverishment of the small midwestern town as its dead speak of their repressed, frightened, hypocritical, stoical, and occasionally fulfilled lives and sometimes contrast hardy pioneer days with the decadent present. The book was immediately controversial.
Masters's next volume of poems, Domesday Book, appeared in 1920, as did the first of seven novels, Mitch Miller. Meanwhile his two careers, law and literature, the breakup of the Chicago literary movement, and his wife's refusal to grant a divorce were bringing his life to a crisis. Finding no relief in a 1921 Mediterranean vacation, he abandoned both family and the law and moved to New York to concentrate on literature. Divorced in 1923, in 1924 he brought out The New Spoon River, an unsuccessful treatment of American urban life.
Masters married again in 1926 and published the first of a series of historical verse plays. In the 1930s he turned to biography and history, writing of Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and his friend Vachel Lindsay and of Chicago. His autobiography, Across Spoon River, appeared in 1936. He died on March 6, 1950.
Further Reading
A short study of Masters is in Lois Teal Hartley, Spoon River Revisited (1963). He is also discussed in Poets and Their Art (1926; rev. ed. 1967) by Harriet Monroe; in Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry (1946); and in Literary History of the United States, edited by Robert E. Spiller and others (1948; rev. ed. 1964).
Additional Sources
Masters, Edgar Lee, Across Spoon River: an autobiography, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991, 1936.
Masters, Hardin Wallace, Edgar Lee Masters: a biographical sketchbook about a famous American author, Rutherford N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978.
Masters, Hilary, Last stands: notes from memory, Boston: D.R. Godine, 1982; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984, 1982.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Edgar Lee Masters |
Bibliography
See his autobiography Across Spoon River (1936).
| Works: Works by Edgar Lee Masters |
| 1898 | A Book of Verses. Masters's first poetry collection is chiefly significant for its contrast with the style and mastery of Spoon River Anthology (1915). A second volume, The Blood of the Prophets, would be published anonymously in 1905, and Masters would issue two volumes of Songs and Sonnets in 1910 and 1912 before his breakthrough in 1915. |
| 1915 | Spoon River Anthology. First appearing serially in Reedy's Mirror in 1914, Masters's collection of verse epitaphs, revealing the secret lives of those buried in a Midwestern town's cemetery, becomes a popular and critical sensation. An expanded edition would be issued in 1916, and a new collection, The New Spoon River, appeared in 1924. Masters never duplicated the impact of his 1915 collection, however. He was buried in the cemetery in Lewiston, Illinois, where he derived the names of his subjects from the tombstones. |
| 1916 | Songs and Satires. Following the phenomenal success of Spoon River Anthology (1915), Masters produces the first of five volumes of miscellaneous verse. All are largely dismissed as inferior early work and contribute to his declining reputation. The others are The Great Valley (1916), Toward the Gulf (1918), Starved Rock (1919), and The Open Sea (1921). |
| 1920 | Domesday Book. Masters hoped that this novel-in-poetry about the sudden death of a former Red Cross worker would become his masterpiece, a "census spiritual / Taken of our America." In this psychological study, Elenor Murray is seen from various angles, in the manner of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book. Critics find the poem excessively dull and didactic, but Masters would persist with a sequel, The Fate of the Jury (1929). |
| 1920 | Mitch Miller. Masters's novel about two boys who try to live out the adventures encountered in Twain's Tom Sawyer is called by critic William Stanley Braithwaite "the best boy's story in our generation." A sequel, Skeeters Kirby, would follow in 1923. |
| 1922 | Children of the Market Place. Masters's novel offers a portrait of American life before the Civil War through the career of political figure Stephen Douglas, as seen by an English immigrant. |
| 1924 | The New Spoon River. Despite returning to the epigraph-portraiture method of his greatest success, Spoon River Anthology (1915), Masters fails to achieve a comparable impact with this fierce indictment of modern urban America. |
| 1926 | Lee: A Dramatic Poem. The poet celebrates Robert E. Lee's life and character in a series of vignettes forming a solemn elegy. |
| 1928 | Jack Kelso. Masters offers an offbeat reflection of American history in the dramatic monologue of Abraham Lincoln's friend and companion during his days in New Salem, Illinois. |
| 1931 | Lincoln the Man. This intemperate and hostile interpretation belittles Lincoln's character and denigrates his achievements. Reviewers are puzzled by it and speculate that the book would harm its author's reputation more than its subject's. |
| 1935 | Invisible Landscapes. A collection of reflective, descriptive observations in marked contrast to the dramatic epigrammatic style of Spoon River Anthology. Masters also publishes the critical biography Vachel Lindsay. |
| 1936 | Poems of People. Masters's character studies and verse portraits of fifty men and women fails to achieve the success of Spoon River Anthology (1915). |
| 1936 | Across Spoon River. Masters supplies a frank autobiographical account of his Midwestern boyhood, his years as a struggling lawyer, and his writing career up to 1917. |
| 1937 | The New World. This long epic poem presents the history of America before Columbus to the end of the Great War. Displaying a shift in style from the condensed portraiture of Spoon River Anthology, the author heaps scorn on the materialism that he sees dissolving American freedom and morality in a long-winded and often ponderous work. |
| 1937 | The Tide of Time. A chronicle of an Illinois town from its founding in 1822. Readers acknowledge the book's epic ambitions but mainly resist it as overly heavy going and dull. |
| 1937 | Whitman. Masters's critical biography attempts to deal with both the poet's private, emotional life and his wider cultural significance. |
| 1938 | Mark Twain: A Portrait. Masters's brief critical biography emphasizes Twain's troubled genius and divided nature as a social critic and one who yielded to his society's materialistic influences. |
| 1941 | Illinois Poems. The poet continues his celebration of country and small-town life. |
| Quotes By: Edgar Lee Masters |
Quotes:
"How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?"
"Beware of the man who rises to powerFrom one suspender."
| Wikipedia: Edgar Lee Masters |
| Edgar Lee Masters | |
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| Born | 23 August 1868 Garnett, Kansas, United States1 |
| Died | 5 March 1950 (aged 81) Melrose Park, PA,United States1 |
| Occupation | Poet, Biographer, Lawyer |
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Edgar Lee Masters (Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 1868 - Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, March 5, 1950) was an American poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.
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Born on August 23, 1868 to Emma J. Dexter and Hardin Wallace Masters in Garnett, Kansas, his father had briefly moved to set up a law practice. The family soon moved back to his paternal grandparents' farm near Petersburg in Menard County, Illinois. In 1880 they moved to Lewistown, Illinois, where he attended high school and had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News. The culture around Lewistown, in addition to the town's cemetery at Oak Hill, and the nearby Spoon River were the inspirations for many of his works, most notably Spoon River Anthology, his most famous and acclaimed work. Spoon River was Masters's revenge on small-town hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness. It gained a huge popularity, but shattered his position as a respectable member of establishment.
Masters attended The Knox Academy from 1889-1890, a defunct preparatory program run by Knox College, but was forced to leave due to his family's inability to finance his education. [1]
After working in his father's law office, he was admitted to the Illinois bar and moved to Chicago, where he established a law partnership with Kickham Scanlan in 1893. He married twice. In 1898, he married Helen M. Jenkins, the daughter of a lawyer in Chicago, and had three children. During his law partnership with Clarence Darrow, from 1903 to 1908, Masters defended the poor. In 1911, he started his own law firm, despite the three years of unrest (1908-1911) due to extramarital affairs and an argument with Darrow.
Two of his children followed him with literary careers. His daughter Marcia pursued poetry, while his son, Hilary Masters became a novelist. Hilary and his half-brother Hardin wrote a memoir of their father. [2]
Masters died at a nursing home on March 5, 1950, in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania.[3] He is buried in Oakland cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois. His epitaph includes his poem, "To-morrow is My Birthday" from Toward the Gulf (1918):
Good friends, let’s to the fields…
After a little walk and by your pardon,
I think I’ll sleep, there is no sweeter thing.
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep.
I am a dream out of a blessed sleep-
Let’s walk, and hear the lark.
Edgar's father was Hardin Wallace Masters, whose father was Squire Davis Masters, whose father was Thomas Masters, whose father was Hillery Masters, and his father was Robert Masters who was born c.1715 in Prince Georges County, Maryland.
Masters first declared his love for jade, early poems and essays under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace (after his mother's maiden name and his father's middle name) until the year 1903, when he joined the law firm of Clarence Darrow.
Masters began developing as a notable American poet in 1914 , when he began a series of poems (this time under the pseudonym Webster Ford) about his childhood experiences in Western Illinois, which appeared in Reedy's Mirror, a St. Louis publication. In 1915 the series was bound into a volume and re-titled Spoon River Anthology.
Though he never matched the success of his Spoon River Anthology, Masters was a prolific writer of diverse works. He published several other volumes of poems including Book of Verses in 1898, Songs and Sonnets in 1910, The Great Valley in 1916, Song and Satires in 1916, The Open Sea in 1921, The New Spoon River in 1924, Lee in 1926, Jack Kelso in 1928, Lichee Nuts in 1930, Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma in 1930, Godbey, sequel to Jack Kelso in 1931, The Serpent in the Wilderness in 1933, Richmond in 1934, Invisible Landscapes in 1935, The Golden Fleece of California in 1936, Poems of People in 1936, The New World in 1937, More People in 1939, Illinois Poems in 1941, and Along the Illinois in 1942.
Masters was awarded the Mark Twain Silver Medal in 1936, the Poetry Society of America medal in 1941, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1942, and the Shelly Memorial Award in 1944.
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