SOURCE: An introduction to The New Spoon River, The Macmillan Company, 1968, pp. xvii-xxvi.

In the following excerpt, Barnstone examines the misanthropy inherent in Masters's portrait of small-town America.

When Spoon River Anthology first appeared in 1915, it was greeted as a new form of literary expression and as a breakthrough in its candid treatment of small-town mores. It received phenomenal public acclaim, greater than any volume of poems since Hiawatha. Yet, because of its exposure of rural life, it also provoked a nationwide moral controversy.¹ Looking back, it is strange to recall how once an angry young man's poems could have so pleased and outraged an American public, how Edgar Lee Masters' verbal missiles against a philistine target achieved such a noisy success. By 1961 Spoon River Anthology had gone through seventy editions, had been translated into at least eight foreign tongues, and had been made into an American play...