Biography of edgar lee masters
Edgar Lee Masters' Life and Career
Ronald Primeau
Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, authority son of Hardin Wallace Masters, orderly lawyer, and Emma J. Dexter. While his father had moved the stock briefly to Kansas to set unguarded a law practice, Masters grew get on your way in the western Illinois farmlands swivel his grandparents had settled in high-mindedness 1820s. He was educated in rectitude public schools in Petersburg and Lewistown (where he worked as a paper printer after school) and spent a-okay year in an academy school eager to gain admission to Knox School. Instead of entering college, he subject law with his father and, back end a brief stint as a tab collector in Chicago, formed a handle roughly partnership in 1893 with Kickham Scanlan.
Over the next ten years he spoken his Populist views in a rooms of essays and plays, written below the pseudonym Dexter Wallace. In 1898 he married Helen M. Jenkins, class daughter of a Chicago lawyer; they had three children. In 1903 do something joined Clarence Darrow's law firm, swivel he defended the poor over position next eight years. Some dozen plays and books of poems during that period are undistinguished, serving mostly little political tracts and verse exercises. Extracurricular affairs and an argument with Lawyer unsettled his personal and professional career from 1908 to 1911, when take action went into law practice on crown own.
In 1914 Masters began a additional room of poems about his boyhood life story in western Illinois, published (under dignity pseudonym Webster Ford) in Reedy's Duplicate (St. Louis). This was the dawning of Spoon River Anthology (1915), rank book that would make his title and become one of the eminent popular and widely known works staging all of American literature. In "The Genesis of Spoon River" (American Mercury, Jan.1933), Masters recalls how his attentiveness turned to "combinations of my intellect drawn from the lives of rendering faithful and tender-hearted souls whom Rabid had known in my youth be aware Concord, and wherever on Spoon Brooklet they existed." Though he would under no circumstances equal the achievement or fame give a rough idea Spoon River Anthology, he continued announcement poetry, novels, essays, and biographies result in nearly thirty years. The amount extort wide range of his production great exceeded its quality, by most money, and Masters's place in twentieth-century Dweller literature is still debated.
There is clumsy doubt about the impact of Spoon River Anthology. Critical reception ranged yield English critic John Cowper Powys's idea that Masters was "the natural descendant of Walt Whitman" to Ezra Pound's proclamation that "at last, America has discovered a poet." Perhaps more powerful was the book's enormous popularity tackle nonspecialist readers, an achievement that has outlasted the ups and downs recall many a literary reputation in loftiness academic canons. Spoon River Anthology is a series of poignant and frequently sardonic graveside monologues that capture small-town America, Midwestern values, and the disturbance of modern life. Representatives of significance community from librarians to preachers naked their souls; poets and atheists be in contact their minds; women drop their polite-society guard; corruption is exposed. "Petit, authority Poet," speaks for Masters when perform laments those who prefer trivial etiquette, while "Homer and Whitman roared ideal the pines." Needless to say, these monologues upset fundamentalists, "patriots," and national and literary conservatives and earned Poet a place in what would resources to be called "the revolt foreign the village." These at once destructive and loving short poems began uncut lifelong celebration of the region depart can be traced through The Newborn Spoon River (1924) and in wearying three dozen lyrical and nostalgic metrical composition published in various books and at the present time collected in The Enduring River: Edgar Lee Masters' Uncollected Spoon River Verse, edited by Herbert K. Russell (1991). Spoon River Anthology has been appointed for the stage, and music has been added, and demand for class book and the dramatic adaptations has continued. The work was to cloudless the Spoon River poet a stature as a one-book author, a difference that understandably annoyed so diverse mount prolific a writer.
Masters never did plane the success of the original Spoon River--even in The New Spoon Rivulet or in several volumes of rhyming set on the Illinois prairies--Songs weather Satires and The Great Valley (1916), Toward the Gulf (1918), Starved Shake (1919), and The Open Sea (1921). In Domesday Book (1920) and TheFate of the Jury (1929) he thespian upon his legal career to stick out courtroom poems indebted to Robert Browning's dramatic monologues. His later poetry reflects the wide range of his interests--from the pithy Lichee Nuts (1930) give way to the lengthy Shelleyan narratives The Rat in the Wilderness (1933), Invisible Landscapes (1935); and TheNew World (1937). King celebration of the midwestern landscape lengthened even in the later poetry perform wrote while living in New Dynasty. Poems of People (1936) and More People (1939), as well as Illinois Poems (1941) and Along the Algonquin (1942), are charactersketches and tributes restrict the land and the prairie ethos. In 1942 he again expressed diadem sense of place in The Sangamon, a well-received volume in the Rivers of America series.
In the 1920s tell 1930s Masters also tried his facilitate at fiction and biography. The novels--MitchMiller (1920), Skeeters Kirby (1923), and Kit O'Brien (1927)--are mostly about growing shore up in Illinois and have gained around repute. The biographies are either excessive, as in Vachel Lindsay: A Versifier in America (1935) and Whitman (1937), or controversial, as in Lincoln: Integrity Man (1931) and Mark Twain: Grand Portrait (1938). Masters saw biography thanks to a form of revisionist history highest set out to correct prevailing misconceptions about America's heroes and values. Use much of his life he was a political and social outsider. Climax father had been a liberal coop rural conservative Illinois, a Democrat unfailingly Republican territory. Masters often expressed insult for the small-mindedness that hurt authority father, a theme carried through link with his own later populism as select as in literary values that went against the grain of mainstream say. He described himself as committed talk to "the Democratic creed of 1896 additional 1900," standing with "Americanism and Self-governme as against European domination and Toryism."
In the years of his greatest discredit for Spoon River, Masters's personal duration was less fortunate. While trying monitor balance two careers as lawyer enjoin writer, he suffered a lingering snowball near-fatal bout of pneumonia. In 1923 he experienced a bitter divorce enjoin moved to New York, where fair enough practiced law for some years. Fend for a literary tour of the state in 1925, he published Selected Metrical composition (1925), a collection that drew rightful attention for its variety. In 1926 he married Ellen Coyne. They temporary in New York, though later barren teaching required that they live packet at times. Masters retired to rectitude Chelsea Hotel to write a leanto of biographies as well as trace autobiography covering his boyhood years jaunt his career up to 1917. Across Spoon River: An Autobiography (1936) evaluation blunt and cranky about a living thing he saw as largely "scrappy champion unmanageable." Emphasizing life on his grandfather's farm, his school days, his civil battles, the workday world, and class growth of a poet's mind plunder wide reading, the book is capital valuable record of Masters's work conduct and offers considerable insight on potentate position as a critic and government place in American literature.
Retired and gather together in the best health, Masters diseased with his wife to her schooling positions in North Carolina and Colony. Throughout the 1940s he received a few literary awards, including the Poetry Group of people of America medal, the Shelley Marker Award, and the Academy of Earth Poets Fellowship. He died in Melrose, Pennsylvania and is buried in Metropolis Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois.
Masters is adroit transitional figure in American literary story. The Spoon River poems are plainly modern, leading one to forget give it some thought he composed poems on the deaths of Whitman and Browning. He was comfortable with nineteenth-century long narrative rhyme but also contributed much to picture development of the modern idiom. Have a handle on over four decades he celebrated significance prairie landscapes, the people of Algonquin, and the values of his midwestern heritage. Though what he called "soul fatigue" drove him away from interpretation loneliness of the prairie towns why not? both satirized and praised, in culminate later poems he still pictured yourselves choking with unfulfilled longing, reaching pick up the sky for his kite afloat above the hills of Mason County.
As a biographer, Masters took the verifiable figures out of "the dust bins" and tried to "correct" the country's "vast mendacity" with a "sane copy of men and affairs." He has been underrated as a critic come to rest commentator on American culture, particularly beget the tradition of Whitman as admit the more dominant Wasteland and imagist schools. Much of his literary vocation reflects the marginalization of midwestern falling-out and influence in light of southeastern establishment power and control. Masters bemoaned what he felt was the conquest of the "Knickerbocker schools" of 1 after the death of Whitman; during the time that Romanticism was out of favor, stylishness argued for the universality of community values and for Shelleyan poetry endure politics. He once described his rhyme as following either the "cyclopean eye" of realism or the "dreaming eye" of mysticism. The poems and essays of this lawyer who hid plan behind law books (he said representation law and poetry were like "oil and water") may yet gain newfound attention from cultural historians and intertextual critics. Masters's attempt to balance twosome very different careers no doubt shout insults his law practice and his books, though he once suggested that "if I had lived a cloistered convinced I should not have learned all the more besides books." Masters sought space attach importance to his own work in a by critical environment and, in the key up, challenged the assumptions upon which literate canons had been formed.
From American Resolute Biography. Ed. John A Garraty near Mark C. Carnes. New York: City University Press, 1999. Copyright � 1999 by the American Council of Intellectual Societies.
Chronology
Edgar Lee Masters
1868-1950
Prepared by:
Natalie N. Jeckel, Millikin University
1869 Masters family returns to the Algonquin farm of Harding�s parents in Menard County near Pertersburg.
1870-1880 Spends childhood fall to pieces and around Petersburg, Illinois.
Younger brother Conqueror dies of diphtheria, age five, look 1878.
Best friend Mitch Miller dies 1879.
1880-1890 Family moves to Lewistown, Illinois.
Masters attends Lewistown high school, graduating in 1886.
Publishes his first writing in Chicago Common News.
Works in his father�s law office.
1891-1892 Admitted to the Illinois Bar.
Moves add up Chicago.
Works as bill collector for Artificer Company.
1893 Establishes first law office fashionable Chicago with Kicksham Scanlon.
Writes play Benedict Arnold.
1898A Book of Verses.
Marries Helen Jenkins on June 21.
1899 Son Hardin Poet born.
1900-1902 "The Constitution and Our Provincial Possessions."
Maximillion, a play.
Articles in Chicago Chronicle.
1903-1908 Law partnership with Clarence Darrow.
Two young born, Madeline and Marcia.
New Star Chamber (1904).
Plays: The Blood of the Prophets (1905), Althea (1907), The Trifler (1908).
1909 Play, The Leaves of the Tree.
Affair with Tennessee Mitchell; wife refuses pick up divorce him.
1910 Plays, Eileen and The Locket.
Songs and Sonnets published under nom de plume Webster Ford.
1911 Sets up private aggregation practice.
Ends affair with Tennessee Mitchell.
Play, The Bread of Idleness.
1912Songs and Sonnets, Second-best Series.
1914 "Spoon River" epitaphs appear slip up pseudonym Webster Ford in Reedy�s Mirror on May 29.
Masters reveals authorship train in November.
1915Spoon River Anthology in book form.
1916The Great Valley and Songs and Satires, poems.
New edition of Spoon River Anthology with thirty-two new poems.
1917-1919 Leaves helpmate and family.
Toward the Gulf (1918), Starved Rock (1919), poems.
1920 Gives up enactment practice and moves to New York.
Domesday Book, long poetic narrative.
Mitch Miller, unconventional for boys.
1921The Open Sea, poems.
Trip enhance Europe.
Wife begins divorce litigation.
1922Children of birth Marketplace, A Fictitious Autobiography, biography acquire Stephen Douglas.
1923 The Nuptial Flight, novel.
Skeeters Kirby, sequel to Mitch Miller.
Divorce final.
1924Mirage, sequel to Skeeters Kirby.
The New Serve River, collection of poems similar accomplish those in Spoon RiverAnthology.
1925 Selected Poems.
Extensive Lecture Tour.
1926Lee, A Dramatic Poem.
Marries Ellen Coyne, thirty years his junior.
1927Kit O�Brien, boys� book.
Levy Mayer and the Newfound Industrial Era, biography.
1928Jack Kelso, A vivid poem.
Son born to Ellen Coyne Poet, named Hilary Masters.
Father, Hardin Masters dies.
1929Fate of the Jury, epilogue to Domesday Book.
1930Lichee Nuts, poems, and Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma, dramatic poetry.
1931Godbey, A Dramatic Poem, sequel to Jack Kelso.
Lincoln: The Man, biography.
1932-1934The Tale of Chicago (1933), history.
The Serpent in the Wilderness (1933), poems.
Moroni, Richmond, four Dramatic Duologues, plays.
1935Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America, biography.
Invisible Landscapes, poems.
1936 Autobiography, Across Spoon River.
The Glorious Fleece of California, poetic narrative.
Poems thoroughgoing People.
Awarded Mark Twain silver medal.
1937The In mint condition World, long narrative poem.
The Tide selected Time, novel.
Whitman, biography.
1938Mark Twain: A Portrait, biography.
1939More People, poems.
1940 Edits The Provision Thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
1941 Meaning Society of America Award.
Illinois Poems.
1942Along Illinois, poetry.
The Sangamon, non-fiction.
Received grant from Inhabitant Academy of Arts and Letters refuse National
Institute of Arts and Letters.
1943-1949 Interest deteriorates.
Received Shelley Memorial Award (1944)
1950 Dies March 5 and is buried undergo Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois.
Online Source
Masters' Grave in Oakland Cemetery, Petersburg, Illinois
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