Spoon River Anthology - Softcover

Aidman, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0573615705 ISBN 13: 9780573615702

Publisher: Samuel French, Inc., 2011

Synopsis

Charles Aidman, conceived from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology

Dramatic Platform Readings w/incidental music, songs

Characters: 3 male, 2 female

Bare Stage.

Via musical interludes, we are introduced in a cemetery to the ghosts of those who were inhabitants of this town, and whose secrets have gone with them to the grave. There are 60 odd characterizations and vignettes in this constantly interesting entertainment offering an amazingly varied array of

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: Samuel French, Inc.
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0573615705
• ISBN 13: 9780573615702
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 62