Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters was raised in Pettersburg, Illinois (Meet). I think that is cool. I did not know that Illinois had so much history to it. I knew we had a lot of important places from Abraham Lincoln. It is cool to know we had more than just one important persons to our state. While he was growing up, he read works by Charles Dickens and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Meet). Those good and talented writers helped him to establish that he wanted to become a writer also. He was an apprentice for a local printer (Meet). He went to Knox College for one year also (Meet). Masters knew he wanted to become a writer, but his father wanted him to become a lawyer (Meet). He did go into layering (Meet).He was very well with the law. He started a law office in Chicago (Meet). He was a very successful attorney (Meet). He even argued some of his argument in front the Supreme Court (Meet). He married a woman named, Helen M. Jenkins in 1898, and they had three children together (Meet). He was able to write and work at his law firm at the same time. He published many good works and poems during this time (Meet). He became good friends with the editors of Poetry Magazine (Meet). He decided to leave his family to move to New York to work on his writing after sixteen years in Chicago (Meet). In New York, he meet a woman named Elaine Coyne and he married her in 1926.
Spoon river Anthology is a book of poems and memoirs of people around the area. I read the poem, Emily Sparks. In the poem, a woman is looking for her boy who is a student in her class (Spoon). It shows realism because the teacher is worried for hte boy and how he will survive in the real world on his own. Realism deals with the real feelings of people and what they do about those feelings (Werlock). The teacher knows thow boy will be fine in the real world, but she still has fear for him (Spoon). She says, "Where is my boy, my boy In what far part of the world? The boy I loved best of all in the school?" (Spoon). This is sad because she really cares for the boy and is looking for him. She knows he is okay, but she wants peace of mind to be sure he is safe.
I also read the excerpt by Ralph Rhodes. Ralph is worried about spending all of his fathers money (Spoon River). "All they said was true: I wrecked my father’s bank with my loans" (Spoon). This is a part of realism because people always spend More money than they need to and it puts them in to debt. Ralph also wanted to go to New York and to be on Broadway (Spoon). This is realism because he is relaying a dream that he has and many people have. Since many people have that dream, he was told that he would not make it and would be kicked back to Spoon River (Spoon). It shows realism because they are not sparing Ralph's feelings, they are telling them flat out what they think.
Edgar Lee Masters earned many awards for the Spoon river Anthology. He received the Poetry Society of America Award, the Mark Twain silver medal, and the Shelley Memorial Award (Meet). Those are great awards for a great poet. The Spoon River Anthology is his only literally success, but he did publish over fifty poems (Meet).

"Meet Edgar Lee Masters." Glencoe Literature. Comp. Jeffery D. Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw Hill, 2009. 514. Print.

Masters, Edgar Lee. "Spoon Rivers Anthology." Bartleby: Great Books Online. 2011. Online. http://www.bartleby.com/84/index.html. February 13, 2011.