Edgar Lee Masters was born at Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 1869, of old Puritan and pioneering stock. When he was still a boy, the family moved to Illinois, where, after desultory schooling, he studied law in his father’s office at Lewiston. For a year he practised with his father and then went to Chicago, where he became a successful and prominent attorney.

Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a great quantity of verse in traditional forms on still more traditional themes; by the time he was twenty-four he had written about four hundred poems, revealing the result of wide reading and betraying the influence of Poe, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. His work, previous to the publication of Spoon River Anthology, was derivative and undistinguished. In 1895 he wrote a blank verse play on Benedict Arnold. In 1898 he published A Book of Verses, a selection of some sixty of the early four hundred. In 1902 Maximilian, another blank verse play, appeared, causing no more comment than the others. Nothing daunted, Masters published several volumes in rapid succession (three books of poetry appearing, under various pseudonyms, between 1905 and 1912), The New Star Chamber and Other Essays (1904), Blood of the Prophets (1905), Althea, a play (1907), The Trifler, another play (1908).

In 1914, Masters, at the suggestion of his friend William Marion Reedy, turned from his preoccupation with classic subjects and began to draw upon the life he knew for those concise records which have made him famous. Taking as his model The Greek Anthology, which Reedy had pressed upon him, Masters evolved Spoon River Anthology, that astonishing assemblage of over two hundred self-inscribed epitaphs, in which the dead of a middle Western town are supposed to have written the truth about themselves. Through these frank revelations, many of them interrelated, the village is recreated for us; it lives again, unvarnished and typical, with all its intrigues, hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The crippling monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of ideals, the struggle toward higher goals—all is synthesized in these crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard here—even Masters’s, who explains the reason for his medium and the selection of his form through “Petit, the Poet.”

The success of the volume was stupendous. (See Preface.) With every new attack (and its frankness continued to make fresh enemies) its readers increased; it was imitated, parodied, reviled as “a piece of yellow journalism;” hailed as “an American ComÉdie Humaine.” Finally, after the storm of controversy, it has taken its place as a landmark in American literature.

With Spoon River Anthology Masters arrived—and left. He went back to his first rhetorical style, resurrecting many of his earlier trifles, reprinting dull echoes of Tennyson, imitations of Shelley, archaic paraphrases in the manner of Swinburne. Yet, though none of Masters’s subsequent volumes can be compared to his masterpiece, all of them contain examples of the same straightforwardness, the stubborn searching for truth that intensified his best known characterizations.

Songs and Satires (1916) contains the startling “All Life in a Life” and the gravely moving “Silence.” The Great Valley (1916) is packed with echoes and a growing dependence on Browning. In Toward the Gulf (1918), the Browning influence predominates, although there are such splendid individual monologues as “The World Saver,” “St. Deseret” and “Front the Ages with a Smile.” Starved Rock (1919) and Domesday Book (1920) are, like all Masters’s later books, queerly assembled mixtures of good, bad and derivative verse. And yet, for all of this poet’s borrowings, in spite of his cynicism and disillusion, Masters’s work is a continual searching for some key to the mystery of truth, the mastery of life.