Poetry
Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters · 1915
Opening lines
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
The dead of a cemetery in Illinois, on the hill, speak in turn, each in an epitaph in free verse. The banker's son confesses to having sunk his father's bank by speculating on wheat, a woman says her husband paid in place of the guilty, a judge tells how he rose and then took revenge, the pastor what he endured from his wife, and she what she keeps silent. The accounts answer one another from grave to grave, and little by little the affairs of the town are pieced together.
Context
The epitaphs first appear weekly in the Reedy's Mirror of St. Louis from 29 May 1914, under the pseudonym Webster Ford, which protects the lawyer's practice; William Marion Reedy had made him read the funerary epigrams of the Greek Anthology. The volume appears with Macmillan in April 1915 and is enlarged the following year; eighty thousand copies are sold in four years. The inhabitants recognise local people under barely disguised names, and the book is banned in the schools and the library of Lewistown until 1974.
Who it is for
More than two hundred short pieces that can be read separately, but many of which answer one another: it is best to follow the cross-references from one name to another.
Prizes and reception
One of the best-selling poetry collections in American history, translated into many languages, into Italian as early as 1943.
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