Edgar Lee Masters’s best-selling Spoon River Anthology (1915) captured a regional conception of Midwestern rural life, packaged it in verse by fictional dead people, and disseminated it so widely that the book helped shift the popular conception of the representative American municipality from the New England village to the Midwestern small town. Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town explores the atmosphere into which Masters’s book was born and the environments in which it thrived, even beyond the life and legacy of its author. Masters’s book aroused i ... More

Edgar Lee Masters’s best-selling Spoon River Anthology (1915) captured a regional conception of Midwestern rural life, packaged it in verse by fictional dead people, and disseminated it so widely that the book helped shift the popular conception of the representative American municipality from the New England village to the Midwestern small town. Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town explores the atmosphere into which Masters’s book was born and the environments in which it thrived, even beyond the life and legacy of its author. Masters’s book aroused interest among modernists like Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Carl Van Doren and popular writers like William Allen White. Its legacy resonated in popular culture through films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Rebel without a Cause, amusement parks like Disneyland, and The Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Main Street. One hundred years after its publication, signs of Spoon River could still be found in films like Fargo; Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri; television series like Twin Peaks, Stranger Things, and Ozark; and the radio program A Prairie Home Companion. While this book uncovers the milieu in which Spoon River Anthology was created, it also traces the ways in which Americans embraced, debated, and transformed Masters’s portrayal of Spoon River and made it part of the mythology of small-town life in the United States.