Biography Essay

Beginning in May 1914 Edgar Lee Masters, then an eminently successful Chicago lawyer, published in the St. Louis magazine Reedy's Mirror, under the pseudonym Webster Ford, some two hundred poems about talkative ghosts in a midwestern cemetery. His identity was revealed the following November, and in 1915 the poems were collected in book form as the Spoon River Anthology. The volume became an international popular and critical success and introduced with a flourish what has since come to be known as the Chicago Renaissance. Readers had never before seen anything quite like these poetic monologues, or "epitaphs." Literary critics accused Masters of showing too little respect for poetic rules; a wide variety of people felt that he had written too realistically about subjects which heretofore had been regarded as inappropriate for verse. Yet for these very reasons Masters's book soon became what Percy Boynton described in his Some...