Edgar Lee Masters Books

Best known for his 1915 bestseller "Spoon River Anthology", Masters writes in a style simple and intimate; something that almost anyone can read.

This personal portrait paints a picture of the attorney/author's life, loves, pinnacles, and misfortunes, and gives us a clear view of life as it was at the turn of the century.

Born in Garnett, Kansas, and raised in the Petersburg, Illinois region, Masters tells the story of the famous and not-so-famous people who touched his life and left their marks on this celebrated author.

This frank verbal self-portrait reveals the forming of the epitaphal poet. His early years are seen against the backdrop of his midwestern roots, his law training, and emergent writing. Particularly of interest are his anecdotes of life in the Chicago of Clarence Darrow, the White City, and his romantic ventures. The text gives insight into what formed the voices of Spoon River Anthology. It's haunting, wistful and funny. Tender nostalgia, particularly for Illinoisans.

Edgar Lee Masters is the author of "Spoon River Anthology", one of the most widely read and discussed volumes of American poetry ever written. Biographer Herbert Russell reveals that Masters was also a successful Chicago lawyer who detested the practice of law, married twice and constantly pursuing other women, and at the same time, one of America's most prolific authors, publishing 53 books during his lifetime. Yet only one of works afforded him lasting recognition. Russell draws from Master's diaries, correspondences, unpublished chapters of a 1936 autobiography, and information from his two wives, children, lovers, and contemporaries (including Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Harriet Monroe, William Jennings Bryan, and Clarence Darrow) to reveal the poet's many relationships, impulsive business decisions, and artistic struggles. Edgar Lee Masters is a superbly researched and written biographical portrait of a man who changed the course of American poetry, yet was unable to achieve personal fulfillment and artistic success within his own life.

This is the best and most complete biography of one of America's great poets. Not only has Russell delivered a meticulously researched story in full, he writes in a very forthright and engaging style. This is the ESSENTIAL Edgar Lee Masters source. For those not familiar with Masters there can be no better introduction. Once I started reading it, I found the book hard to put down.

Hilary Masters' memoir Last Stands exhibits uniqueness in writing with a universal appeal. Whether it be upper class zeal, lower class pride, war stories, grandparents, grandchildren, health, humor, abuse, neglect, tolerance, strength, or even food, there is something in it for everyone.

Overall, Last Stands is a patchwork piece--a memoir and indirect autobiography glittered with several familial biographies. Masters constantly switches scenes and elements of focus, but he overlaps his storyline, keeping the reader grounded, despite a sequence of simultaneous events. Thus, history is tied together in a busy but logical manner.

Although Masters reveals disturbing events, he adds tidbits of humor to lighten the mood. In addition, he compares and contrasts fictitious characters, such as Odysseus, to events in his own life--a technique that grants him boundless points-of-view. Furthermore, his ingenuity unfolds with his use of secondary sources: letters, poems, epitaphs, and invitations. Finally, his use of dialogue carries the story where it might otherwise seem bland.

Even where memory falls short in the author's mind, he entertains the reader with his image of how a situation could have happened. Thus, Masters offers creative details of a picture that might have been there, and even if it wasn't, he proves that the truth is as real as the writer's true imagination.

Outstanding quality. I was a little disappointed in the lack of biographical information.

This is incredile writing, Masters ability to give his characters a voice that reachs ones heart and mind simply amazing. Ernest Hyde, is an excellent example of this as well as Amanda Barker,Yee Bow and many others. These are the names of some the voices that Masters sets free. There dry innocent voices are oddly humorous and this is what i find the most refreshing.This is free verse at its finest.

Masters' Spoon River Anthology is as poignant today as when it was written. Part glimpse of history, part poetic essay on the eternal frailties of the human animal, the epitaphs are riveting from first to last. Read it. Then get a spoken word recording. Then read it again. You'll find these characters live on.

This has lots of background and biographical information. Plus it includes other materials. Well done. I was a little disappointed in the quality of the paper.

There IS an actual Spoon River in Fulton County, IL but no town by that name. Masters was speaking about that area because he was writing about what he knew. Like any great literature, it transcends time and place to have more universal meaning. Some characters are small town folk, others aspired to grow beyond and were thwarted by circumstance, while still others grew beyond Spoon River and were brought back home from their travels for eternal rest. "All, all are sleeping on the hill". Each character narrates his or her own brief story in a free verse poem, one per page. Some stories intersect as characters mention each other. It's interesting to cross reference characters in this regard. Sometimes the compliment of mention isn't returned. Upon first inspection, this might seem to be a rather morbid format. However, the characters speak more about their lives and human struggles than they do about death. Theirs are timeless tales about joy, accomplishment, pain, betrayal, discovery, loneliness and atonement.
This book is a real classic. It was given to me for my seventeenth birthday and I've collected several different volumes of it since then including one signed by the author. I think the dramatic format might still catch the attention of alot of teenagers and give them pause to reflect upon the deeper meanings in life. It's one of those must read's for anyone looking to read the American Classics.

Upon its release Edgar Lee Masters' collection of free verse poems must have shaken the literary universe. In an era when the mores of polite Victorianism were still lingering in an America concerned with all things proper, Masters dared pen a book in which the dead of a small Midwestern town lie not in a state of reservation before Christian resurrection, but in a condition of stasis, ruminating on their lives and speaking with candor on all they may have done. The dead who speak from their graves in these wondrous poems reveal their secrets, their unfulfilled dreams, their disapprobation at humanity's conduct. The dead are to varying degrees wise, ironic, witty, bitter, content, confused, and moralistic. They have regrets, they mock the values of we who are living, they seethe with longing, they confess universal truths at long last, they await they know not what, the arrival of eternity or a continuation of their suspended state of evaluation, in conditions of calm, content, fright, or regretless joy. There is one thing none of those who have passed away from the streets of Spoon River to its hallowed acre on the hill, are and that is quiet.

One of a dozen or so American poetical achievements that most fully justifies our nation's pride in its own literary accomplishments.

This really is a classic. Each poem is a person's story, usually one of pain and isolation. It could well serve as the basis for a multi-monologue play. Those who enjoyed this book might want to consider reading Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." It's prose, but similarly a tale of many characters, who are similarly living lives of pain and isolation.

Spoon River is a truly classic collection of creative storytelling and universal emotion. Each character's voice further stimulates the imagination and helps to paint the picture of this fictitious yet very real town. This book is also a gift to actors and theater lovers everywhere. When I was in acting school, I was lucky enough to be assigned the "monologue" of the Lois Spears character (the gratefully blessed blind woman). This was an amazing experience for me as was being introduced to this lovely book.
-Christine Whitmarsh
Author
"One Citizen's Words"One Citizen's Words

". . .What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you--
It takes life to love Life."

So speaks Lucinda Matlock on page 239 in an earlier edition of this book. What comes before is 238 pages of despair. . .more despair. . .all despair. It is all ugliness: the reminiscenses of the drunks, the cruel, the broken of small town American; the confessions of its corrupt and its envious; the sights of a courthouse arson, the fetuses washed into the river. . .

I can't think of anything more depressing than this "poetic" picture of crushed Americans. This is too strong for me.

It's wonderful that a new volume of the Spoon River Anthology has been published after many years. The print is excellent, the size is perfect (a trade paperback.) Edgar Lee Masters' characterizations are timeless, insightful, and beautifully written.

This is a magnificent collection of short prose and monologues. It's the entire collection and not the stage version (the stage version is condensed and doesn't include all the pieces). All the pieces are given by characters who have come back from the grave to tell a short annecdote about themselves while alive. Some are humorous, some are tragic, and some are moralistic. Most characters are fictitious, but some are not. This is a classic peice of work and extremely well written.

This will be short. If you are an historian, both Masters' and Carl Sandburg's fawning accounts are a must, but only because you are an historian. For truth, avoid both these extremes and read David Herbert Donald. If you believe that Masters' view of Lincoln is valid, then you have read nothing else substantive on Lincoln, or you are a neo-Confederate for whom truth means. "The South shall rise again."

After finally reading Masters account, there is little doubt that the attempts to banish this book were premised upon the usual cynical dishonesty of polticians who pander to religion, myth, power and money. Having studied Lincoln, he was only a man conflicted by his upbringing, profession and ultimately a quest for power. Masters was a rational man who understood that inciting a war in which more than 600,000 human beings perished with the justification that those in the South who had voluntarily seceded from a voluntary union could be compelled to remain subjects of a government which was founded as a servant of the people was nothing less than capital crime. Lincoln was, like George W Bush, a sociopathic criminal. It has long been conceded that the war was not fought over slavery; yet, schoolchildren are routinely propagandized by the nonsensical claims about Lincoln which have placed his likeness on pedestals. Our children and citizens need to read such critical analyses, INCLUDING Masters rational critique of the involvement of religion, to understand that we, as the people, were intended to have sovereignty over our own lives, surrendering only such freedom as the Constitution expressly authorizes, and retaining democratic license restrained by the Bill of Rights to avoid majority tyranny. The Civil War was entirely unnecessary and counter productive. For more than a Century after it ended, the hatred it engendered resulted in the denial of real civil rights and freedom to the black minorities. It most certainly would have been more practical and consistent with the prevailing law (at the time) and Constitution for the abolitionists, many of whom were extremely wealthy, to convince the government (with their assistance) to purchase the slaves who were lawfully owned by a Constitutional "taking" with just compensation while simultaneously outlawing any additional slaves. Instead, as we know, the Civil War only enriched the Northern industrialists, impoverished the South and left death, destruction and chaos in its wake. Masters and those who have rationally critiqued the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln were and are right. The majority of Americans are simply ignorant fools who readily accept myths, historical and religious, in making decisions. As proof, there still remain millions of people in this country who believe that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction when we attacked despite the lack of any evidence. Just believe. No, THINK. For those who continue to BELIEVE Lincoln was a great man, look at the facts, examine his statements, speeches and conduct, and I am confident that at a minimum you will conclude that Lincoln was, as Masters states, nothing more nor less than a man but certainly not entitled to any consideration of greatness. What if a President would have been successful without the carnage, destruction and hatred in abolishing slavery? Now that would truly have been a man whose image could justifiably been placed on a pedestal.

Masters hit the nail on the head! Lincoln was a commie who setup corporate welfare, high taxes, and a never-ending quest for power. It is thanks to Lincoln, and the Republican Party that we have big government to this very day. This book along with Thomas Dilorenzo's book the Real Lincoln should be on the desk of every student in America. If only to show that Lincoln was nothing but a consummate politician! Far from being the "great humanitarian" Lincoln was a racist who once stated that Jesus Christ was an illegitimate child, and never proclaimed Christ as his savior, nor was he ever baptized. Mr. Masters did a very good job of helping debunk the Lincoln myth!

Scully and Moulder rejoice, because this book proves "The Truth is Out There". I strongly recommend this book to anyone who yearns to understand why our country is currently in such terrible shape. You will never refer to Lincoln as "Honest Abe" or "The Great Emancipator" ever again after reading this work. I pray that the history books do not lie to our children and revere Clinton the way they do Lincoln. Hopefully, historians will have the same guts that Masters had in 1931 and tell the real story about Clinton.

The book definately strips away the mythic status that has been bestowed on Lincoln over the years. However, it tends to go the opposite way too far and villifies him mercilessly. The tome becomes a constant, annoying barrage. The book does make good points, however, about the Lincoln-Douglas debates and Lincoln's failures in life up to that point. Serious students of Lincoln and the Civil War should read it. The author could have been more balanced, though, and admitted that Lincoln wasn't a slobbering buffoon. Also the author would have been well advised to leave out the obsence anti-religious tone that infected many pages.

Please note that I am only reviewing the novel "Skeeters Kirby", not the entire 56 volume set (I can't imagine).
Ultimately, an unsatisfying book, and not particularly exciting to read either. There's a flatness here, a distancing, as if the author were not quite ready to give of himself. Too many episodes, scenes, characters, are merely fleshed out, cut and dried, with no substance, vigor, or life. Even the title character seems to have no real emotions. Second part of a trilogy. I think this is supposed to be somewhat autobiographical. Set in southern Illinois and Chicago from 1890-1911. The first part is done in a kind of Tom Sawyerish speech, extremely irritating to read. But when he grows out of it, it's still heavy, turgid, flat. Characters come in and go out with dizzying rapidity. However, it is quite obvious that sexual mores were really no different then from now. Even women were quite free.