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  • Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters book cover
  • Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters book cover
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Spoon River Anthology

by Edgar Lee Masters

A town’s hidden lives, told from beyond the grave

$17.22 USD
$26.91 USD $17.22 USD
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Paperback New English

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AlbakiReads Editorial

A town’s hidden lives, told from beyond the grave

Edgar Lee Masters builds this free-verse collection from the voices of Spoon River’s dead, whose accounts complicate the image of an orderly Midwestern town. Illicit relationships, broken confidences, political corruption, and unhappy marriages surface across the poems, making private histories a way to examine the community as a whole. The linked small-town setting gives the collection a shared social frame, while each speaker contributes a distinct account of life and reputation. First published in 1915, the book brings together American poetry and a sustained portrait of hypocrisy beneath civic respectability.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in American poetry and free verse.
  • Those drawn to literary portraits of small-town communities and their social tensions.
  • Readers interested in poems that give voice to multiple speakers.

Themes

Small-town lifePublic respectability and private conductBetrayal and relationshipsPolitical corruption

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

The innovative free verse collection of small-town life that made Edgar Lee Masters a legend

A literary sensation when it appeared in 1915, Spoon River Anthology earned Edgar Lee Masters comparisons to T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman. The characters who speak here tarnish the pure image of their Midwestern hamlet by holding forth from the grave with tales of illicit love affairs, betrayed confidences, political corruption, and miserable marriages. The first serious work of psychological naturalism, this artful indictment of small-town hypocrisy influenced Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and other luminaries.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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