by Carissa Johnson

Created on: February 06, 2010

A man of many thoughtful words and even more controversial ones, a lawyer and a biographer, a small-town hick and a best-selling poet – Edgar Lee Masters lived a prosperous and well-rounded life, despite a few bumps in the road. His explosive success in his master work, Spoon River Anthology, is unbeatable, and his insight into his hundreds of small-town characters and ability to speak his mind shamelessly characterized his unique and groundbreaking life as a poet. He specialized in telling the blunt truth, no matter what the critics said, which startled readers as well as delighted them. Masters was a successful, groundbreaking, and celebrated poet who accumulated a strong base of readers in his lifetime, despite varying criticism on his numerous poems.

Born on August 23, 1869 in Garnett, Kansas, Edgar Lee Masters spent a large portion of his early life in New Salem, Illinois on his grandfather’s farm. At the beginning of his childhood, he lived in Petersburg, where he was influenced by William H. Herndon, a former partner of President Abraham Lincoln. In his later childhood years, Masters lived in Lewistown, a small town located in the Spoon River Valley, the Midwest setting which provided some of the inspiration for his best-selling anthology. Among Masters’s influences are poet Edgar Allen Poe.

His father, Hardin Wallace Masters, was a practicing lawyer, and young Masters studied under him after a year of learning at Knox College, branching off into his own career in 1893 in Chicago, where he spent thirty years. He began to publish works in magazines, newspapers, and later in books under the pseudonyms of Dexter Wallace, Lucius Atherton, Elmer Chubb, Webster Ford, Harley Prowler, and Lute Puckett in order to protect the integrity of his court work.

Although his law practice was highly successful, in 1920 he gave up his law practice to devote himself fully to writing. After this he published a number of works, including plays, novels, and poems. He was married twice – first to a woman named Helen M. Jenkins and then, after his divorce with her, to a young teacher named Ellen Coyne Masters. In this marriage he had a son named Hilary Masters. Edgar Lee Masters had a number of affairs outside of his marriages, including with artist Tennessee Mitchell.

Masters retreated to live alone in New York City in the tail end of his life, and he died in a nursing home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on March 5, 1950 from weak health caused by

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