Across Spoon River, Masters’s autobiography, was published in 1939. One of his later books that gained wide attention was his sharply analytical study of the Civil War president Abraham Lincoln (1931). Other than poems, Master’s published biographies of Vachel Lindsay, whom he had befriend and fellow poet Mark Twain whom he depicted as a frustrated genius, and Walt Whitman. The hotel was an attraction to writers such as Thomas Wolfe, Arthur Miller, Mark Twain, O. Ellen Masters pursued her career as a teacher while her husband retired to the Chelsea Hotel to devote his time to writing. His new wife, Ellen Coyne Masters, was much younger and the daughter of an Irish immigrant. Finally his wife granted him a divorce and he went to New York where he remarried. Since the peak of the Chicago renaissance had passed, Masters considered it impossible to return to his home town. In 1921 Masters left his family and fled to Europe after his wife denied him a divorce. Although it gained vast popularity it destroyed his position as a respectable member of establishment.

The sequel, The New Spoon River, appeared in 1924, but it was not as popular as the first.Spoon River was Masters’s way to gain revenge on narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy. It then went to publication in book form, again anonymously. The work was first printed anonymously in Reedy’s Mirror in 19. “You will die, nodoubt, but die while living In depths of azure, rapt and mated, Kissing the queen-bee, Life!' His mother inspired the original idea and discussed with him the people they used to know in the village. Spoon River is realistic and often cynical epitaphs narrated by 250 people buried in the graveyard of a village in the Middle East. This fueled inspiration for Master’s most famous work, Spoon River Anthology. Masters was introduced to Epigrams from the Greek Anthology in 1909, by Marion Reedy, editor of Reedy’s Mirror of St. His work thereafter, THE NEW STAR CHAMBER (1904) a drama written in blank verse, BLOOD OF THE PROPHETS (1905) which was a collection of essays, and two plays ALTHEA (1907) and THE BREAD OF IDLENESS (1911) In 1898 Masters made his debut with A BOOK OF VERSES. Jenkins who was the daughter of a Chicago lawyer He settled in Chicago where he worked as a lawyer for nearly 30 years. In attempting to follow in his fathers footsteps he attended Knox College, and was admitted to the bar in 1891.

Masters’s father was a lawyer and would not support his son’s literary aspirations. Both Lewiston and Petersburg became models for the scene of his poems in Spoon River Anthology.

A few years later, when Edgar was 11 years old his family settled at Lewiston, Illinois, near Spoon River, where Masters spent his childhood on his grandfather’s farm. Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas in 1869.

Edgar lee masters spoon river