Spoon River Anthology is a collection of short poems that reveals the true nature of the citizens of a fictional small town in Illinois. Each poem is a candid autobiography of a now-deceased resident that lies in the Oak Hill Cemetery-often exposing their darkest secrets.
Edgar Lee Masters was raised in Lewistown, Illinois and based these stories on the gossip he heard there. The book was a commercial success, but was banned from schools and libraries in the area due to the real-life citizens knowing exactly whom each poem was written about. As the years have passed and more generations now lie in Oak Hill Cemetery, Lewistown has forgiven Masters, and he's now celebrated there.
The poems were originally published in the literary magazine Reedy's Mirror under the pseudonym Webster Ford. The first book edition was published in 1915 and contained 209 poems. Masters added 35 new poems, including the epilogue, for the 1916 edition, which is the edition that this Standard Ebooks edition is based on.
Perfect for readers who appreciate haunting poetry that exposes the hidden truths beneath small-town facades, this groundbreaking collection offers an unflinching look at American life through the voices of the dead. Masters' provocative portraits of ordinary people's extraordinary secrets make this a timeless masterpiece that continues to captivate readers over a century after its controversial debut.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)
