Edgar Lee Masters

Given that I'm currently working my way through Spoon River Anthology (which is a bit over-long, I'm beginning to believe), yesterday's note from The Writer's Almanac was particularly timely:

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Edgar Lee Masters, born in Garnett, Kansas (1869). He was one of the first writers to portray the American small town as a place full of secrets, lies, and shocking scandals in his book Spoon River Anthology (1915), a series of poems in the voices of the dead citizens in a fictional graveyard. He published Spoon River Anthology in 1915 under a pseudonym, because he thought it would be controversial, and he was right. The book was hugely scandalous, full of more frank detail about sexual matters than any other book published in America at the time. The critic Amy Lowell wrote, "Spoon River is one long chronicle of rapes, seductions, liaisons, and perversions. One wonders, if life in our little Western cities is as bad as this, why everyone does not commit suicide."

But the scandal made the book a best seller. Spoon River Anthology went through 70 printings, and it allowed Masters to retire from his law practice. It changed the way Americans thought about small towns, which had been considered merely innocent or boring places. American writers had focused almost exclusively on big cities. But Edgar Lee Masters turned small towns into places of intrigue, and American writers have been exploring the closets and bedrooms of small towns ever since.

The people in Masters's hometown were angry for decades about the slanderous things Masters had written about their citizens. It took more than 50 years before the town where Masters went to high school stocked Spoon River Anthology in its library.

Masters based most of his poems' narrators on real people, but didn't make much of an effort to conceal their identities - for example, he might have changed the subject's last name slightly while retaining its first name and occupation. And few of the poems are at all flattering to their subjects, with many being downright cruel. Fortunately for Masters, he didn't publish the book until long after leaving his boyhood home. Good thing, too - had he still lived in "Spoon River" when the book came out, he would likely have been greeted at his door by an angry mob armed with torches and pitchforks. (Not unlike this guy.)