Edgar Lee Masters

Bio

(1868-1950) Poet, author. In 1880 his family settled at Lewiston, Illinois, near the Spoon River. Masters attended school here, and studied at Knox College, but was mainly self-educated through wide reading, acquiring a lifelong love of poetry. He was admitted to the bar in 1891, and the next year moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he maintained a successful law practice until 1920. He lived at the Hotel Chelsea in the 1930s. Meanwhile, he had published poems and stories, chiefly in various newspapers. In 1913 William Marion Reedy, editor of “Reedy’s Mirror” of Saint Louis, Missouri, gave Masters a copy of “Epigrams from the Greek Anthology.” This inspired Masters’ most famous work, “The Spoon River Anthology,” epitaphs spoken by about 250 persons buried in the graveyard of a village in the Midwest, reveling their inner lives in terms which are imaginative but essentially pessimistic. He was the father of novelist Hilary Masters.