Spoon River Anthology

On a hill above the small Illinois town of Spoon River lie its dead, and in more than two hundred short free-verse poems each of them speaks a kind of epitaph, telling the truth about the life they lived: the respectable banker who cheated, the wife who hated her husband, the town drunkard, the honest judge, the girl who died young, and lovers whose secrets the town never knew. As their voices answer and contradict one another, the hidden history of the whole town emerges.

Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950), a Chicago lawyer who had been a law partner of Clarence Darrow, published the poems in 1915, basing many on people he had known in the Illinois towns of Lewistown and Petersburg. The book was a sensation and one of the best-selling volumes of American poetry. Compare the prose of Winesburg, Ohio.