Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950)
American poet and biographer
Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas.
He maintained a successful law practice in Chicago from 1892 to 1920. Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1915),
a collection of epitaphs in free verse revealing the secret lives of dead citizens, was acclaimed for its treatment of small-town American life.
Less successful volumes that followed include Starved Rock (1919), Domesday Book (1920), Poems of People (1936), and Illinois Poems (1941).
His Lincoln the Man (1931) is a bitter and prejudiced attack. Other biographies are Vachel Lindsay (1935),
Whitman (1937), and Mark Twain (1938). |