Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

(b. Garnett, Kans., 23 August 1869; d. Melrose Park, Pa., 5 March 1950) A trained lawyer, Masters had literary ambitions and sought success as a poet, novelist, and biographer. He won critical acclaim for his Spoon River Anthology (1915), a series of free-verse monologues in which several hundred corpses speak from a small-town cemetery about their past. Masters's Spoon River Anthology was a pioneering literary work that foreshadowed a major theme in US literature, namely the “revolt from the village,” or the alienation of urban, 20th-century writers from the idyllic image of rural American life. Masters's poetry anticipated the fiction of Sherwood A nderson and Main Street by Sinclair L ewis . ... log in or subscribe to read full text