Product Description

When Spoon River Anthology was published in 1915 it garnered immediate national attention for its truth and its shocking transgression of societal mores. A collection of poems from the graveyard of a rural Illinois town, Spoon River Anthology poignantly captures the politics, love, betrayals, alliances, hopes, and failures of this small American town. Here is the respected doctor, jailed for swindling; here is the chaste wife, rapt with desire; here is the pastor, angry and resentful; here is the quiet man, filled with unrequited love and devotion. Beneath the midwestern values of honesty, community, family, hard work, and chastity, Spoon River Anthology reveals the disillusionment and corruption in modern life.

With the publication of Spoon River Anthology Masters exploded the powerful myth that small-town America was a social utopia. Here for the first time was a community that people recognized in its wholeness and complexity. Comprised of distinctly modern poems that collectively read as a novel, Spoon River Anthology is the story of a quiet midwestern town whose truths and contradictions are celebrated by its dead.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #660527 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-30
• Released on: 2004-03-30
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .88" h x 5.39" w x 8.06" l, .59 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From School Library Journal
YA-- A richly annotated edition resuscitates a fading American classic. Because Hallivas's pithy introduction adds both perspective and gossipy detail, YAs will enjoy learning about the individual struggles of the 244 characters who speak from the cemetery on "the hill." Secondary teachers will find this a useful tool for preparing character sketches, thanks to the lively, specific annotations naming names: who rejected whom; who challenged whom, both physically and politically--and it is all expertly researched. The microcosm of Spoon River comes alive with its central conflicts of agrarian traditionist v. temperance and abolitionist activism. From the grave, the hard-drinking, roughly hewn frontiersmen challenge the do-good social reformers, reenacting the struggle the 19th-century midwestern push kindled: would any government law prohibiting drinking or slavery impress these strong individual-rights townspeople? They offer their own answers as Masters intended, but they offer the responses against a tapestry of detail the editor provides. Hallivas's cogent essay traces the philosophical influences that marked Masters's works: Spinoza, Goethe, and especially Whitman. The inclusion of several photographs of the characters who speak adds important visual detail.
- Margaret Nolan, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Tombstones, as the man who carved them says he learned over the years, are a form of false history. In this 1915 collection, Edgar Lee Masters tells the stories of the dead--through their own posthumous words--in the fictional town of Spoon River. The stories are well told and often harsh, as the dead of Spoon River carry their anger and grievances to their graves. Masters portrays a town filled with injustice, corruption, and cruelty, an inverse to the idyllic community of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. The cast of 50, headed by Patrick Fraley and Edward Asner, is well matched to the many characters in this excellent production. J.A.S. 2003 Audie Award Finalist © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
"Definitive... Hallwas' reading of 'Spoon River' is undoubtedly the best and the one the poet intended. The Midwest is seens as the New World Eden assaulted by the forces of modernization." -- Chicago Tribune. "Massively annotated... provides a wealth of information." -- The New Republic