SOURCE: An introduction to Spoon River Anthology, Collier Books, 1962, pp. 5-13.

In the following excerpt, Swenson provides a history of the writing and publication of Spoon River.

Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology was the first thing of its kind and a phenomenon in American literature when it appeared in 1915. It is not less so today. Originally conceived as a novel, having the ingredients of a fatalistic drama as well as those of a tract on social injustice, the Anthology is a series of poetic monologues by 244 former inhabitants (both real and imagined) of Spoon River, an area near Lewistown and Petersburg, Illinois, where Masters spent much of his boyhood. All in the cast are dead—“all, all are sleeping on the hill” of a Midwestern cemetery—and from their graves they speak their own epitaphs, discovering and confessing the real motivations of their lives; they reveal the...