Masters' Spoon River Anthology is as poignant today as when it was written. Part glimpse of history, part poetic essay on the eternal frailties of the human animal, the epitaphs are riveting from first to last. Read it. Then get a spoken word recording. Then read it again. You'll find these characters live on.

There IS an actual Spoon River in Fulton County, IL but no town by that name. Masters was speaking about that area because he was writing about what he knew. Like any great literature, it transcends time and place to have more universal meaning. Some characters are small town folk, others aspired to grow beyond and were thwarted by circumstance, while still others grew beyond Spoon River and were brought back home from their travels for eternal rest. "All, all are sleeping on the hill". Each character narrates his or her own brief story in a free verse poem, one per page. Some stories intersect as characters mention each other. It's interesting to cross reference characters in this regard. Sometimes the compliment of mention isn't returned. Upon first inspection, this might seem to be a rather morbid format. However, the characters speak more about their lives and human struggles than they do about death. Theirs are timeless tales about joy, accomplishment, pain, betrayal, discovery, loneliness and atonement.
This book is a real classic. It was given to me for my seventeenth birthday and I've collected several different volumes of it since then including one signed by the author. I think the dramatic format might still catch the attention of alot of teenagers and give them pause to reflect upon the deeper meanings in life. It's one of those must read's for anyone looking to read the American Classics.

Upon its release Edgar Lee Masters' collection of free verse poems must have shaken the literary universe. In an era when the mores of polite Victorianism were still lingering in an America concerned with all things proper, Masters dared pen a book in which the dead of a small Midwestern town lie not in a state of reservation before Christian resurrection, but in a condition of stasis, ruminating on their lives and speaking with candor on all they may have done. The dead who speak from their graves in these wondrous poems reveal their secrets, their unfulfilled dreams, their disapprobation at humanity's conduct. The dead are to varying degrees wise, ironic, witty, bitter, content, confused, and moralistic. They have regrets, they mock the values of we who are living, they seethe with longing, they confess universal truths at long last, they await they know not what, the arrival of eternity or a continuation of their suspended state of evaluation, in conditions of calm, content, fright, or regretless joy. There is one thing none of those who have passed away from the streets of Spoon River to its hallowed acre on the hill, are and that is quiet.

One of a dozen or so American poetical achievements that most fully justifies our nation's pride in its own literary accomplishments.

This has lots of background and biographical information. Plus it includes other materials. Well done. I was a little disappointed in the quality of the paper.