Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition (Prairie State Books) - Softcover

Masters, Edgar Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252063635 ISBN 13: 9780252063633

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1993

Synopsis

"The single most widely read book of American poetry."-James Hurt, Illinois Authors

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: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0252063635
• ISBN 13: 9780252063633
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464
• Editor: Hallwas John E.