Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) was an American poet and lawyer. Raised in the small Illinois towns of Petersburg and Lewistown, near the Spoon River, he practiced law in Chicago for thirty years while publishing conventional verse and plays under his own name and others. Spoon River Anthology (1915), a sequence of free-verse epitaphs spoken by the dead of a prairie town, made him suddenly famous and remains one of the most read books of American poetry. He never matched it; later volumes, novels and biographies of Lincoln, Whitman, Vachel Lindsay and Mark Twain had a mixed reception, and he spent his last years in poverty in New York.