Spoon River Anthology - Softcover

Masters, Edgar Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451525302 ISBN 13: 9780451525307

Publisher: Penguin, 1992

Synopsis

A richly annotated edition resuscitates a fading American classic. Because Hallivas's pithy introduction adds both perspective and gossipy detail, YAs will enjoy learning about the individual struggles of the 244 characters who speak from the cemetery on "the hill." Secondary teachers will find this a useful tool for preparing character sketches, thanks to the lively, specific annotations naming names: who rejected whom; who challenged whom, both physically and politically--and it is all expertly researched. The microcosm of Spoon River comes alive with its central conflicts of agrarian traditionist v. temperance and abolitionist activism. From the grave, the hard-drinking, roughly hewn frontiersmen challenge the do-good social reformers, reenacting the struggle the 19th-century midwestern push kindled: would any government law prohibiting drinking or slavery impress these strong individual-rights townspeople? They offer their own answers as Masters intended, but they offer the responses against a tapestry of detail the editor provides.

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: Penguin
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0451525302
• ISBN 13: 9780451525307
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Loving Jerome