Masters, Edgar Lee

Masters, Edgar Lee (1868?–1950),Kansas‐born lawyer in Chicago (1891–1920), first entered literature as an avocation. His early works included A Book of Verses (1898) and Maximilian (1902), a blank‐verse drama. He was suddenly catapulted into fame with the publication of Spoon River Anthology (1915), free‐verse epitaphs revealing the secret lives of the persons buried in a Midwestern cemetery. Masters did not again achieve the directness and simplicity that characterize these poems, although he employed the same method in The New Spoon River (1924), a bitter commentary on the vicious urban standards of changing America. Domesday Book (1920) and its sequel, The Fate of the Jury (1929), are considered to be among the best of his later poetry, which also includes Songs and Satires (1916); The Great Valley (1916); Toward the Gulf (1918); Starved Rock (1919); the dramatic poems Lee (1926), Jack Kelso (1928), and Godbey (1931); Lichee Nuts (1930), statements of philosophy in the Chinese manner; Invisible Landscapes (1935); Poems of People (1936) and The New World (1937), panoramas of America and its outstanding figures; and Illinois Poems (1941). The Sangamon (1942) is in the Rivers of America series. His other prose books include Mitch Miller (1920), Skeeters Kirby (1923), and Mirage (1924), novels based on his youth; Children of the Market Place (1922), a novel about Stephen Douglas; The Tide of Time (1937), another novel; The Tale of Chicago (1933), an iconoclastic history; and such biographical studies as Lincoln, the Man (1931), bitterly attacking its subject, Vachel Lindsay (1935), Whitman (1937), and Mark Twain (1938), the last presenting Clemens as a frustrated genius. Across Spoon River (1936) is an autobiography.