Spoon River Anthology - Softcover

Masters, Edgar Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1619491923 ISBN 13: 9781619491922

Publisher: Empire Books, 2011

Synopsis

The dead citizens of Spoon River recite poems about their lives, their town, and their sorrows. Each poem is an epitaph, containing fragments of the town’s history. Instantly successful upon its publication in 1915, “Spoon River Anthology” is an unconventional work that explores the gripping but often bleak truths about life in a small American town.

About this title

Review:

"Definitive... Hallwas' reading of 'Spoon River' is undoubtedly the best and the one the poet intended. The Midwest is seens as the New World Eden assaulted by the forces of modernization." -- Chicago Tribune. "Massively annotated... provides a wealth of information." -- The New Republic

From the Author:

A funeral is often the starting point of a novel or film, where the black-clothed mourners, the tolling bell, the minister’s valediction, all set the scene for revelations to come. Edgar Lee Masters takes this an imaginative step further. What a brilliant story-telling device is his method of letting the dead speak for themselves and in doing so create the portrait of a community. It is one any novelist burdened with the minutiae of narrative, the getting characters from A to B and year to year, might envy. There is material for many novels in the 214 free-verse monologues, the tiny autobiographies, which form the text. To take as a model Mackail’s ‘Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology’ was an inspiration; as Martin Seymour-Smith has said, the work "acted as the catalyst required to manufacture the acid of his genius, compounded of an innate bitterness, a passion for the truth, and a rare sympathy for human beings."

About this edition

• Publisher: Empire Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1619491923
• ISBN 13: 9781619491922
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 226