Spoon River Anthology

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Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of unusual, short, free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters, all providing two-hundred forty-four accounts of their lives and losses.

Each poem is an epitaph of a dead citizen, delivered by the dead themselves. They speak about the sorts of things one might expect. Some recite their histories and turning points, others make observations of life from the outside, and petty ones complain of the treatment of their graves, while few tell how they really died. Speaking without reason to lie or fear the consequences, they construct a picture of life in their town that is shorn of all façades. The interplay of various villagers — e.g. a bright and successful man crediting his parents for all he's accomplished, and an old woman weeping because he is secretly her illegitimate child — forms a gripping, if not pretty, whole.

The subject of afterlife receives only the occasional brief mention, and even those seem to be contradictory.

The work features such characters as Tom Merritt, Amos Sibley, Carl Hamblin, Fiddler Jones and A.D. Blood. Many of the characters that make appearances in Spoon River Anthology were based on real people that Masters knew or heard of in the two towns in which he grew up, Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois. Most notable is Ann Rutledge, regarded in local legend to be Abraham Lincoln's early love interest though there is no actual proof of such a relationship. Rutledge's grave can still be found in a Petersburg cemetery, and a tour of graveyards in both towns reveals most of the surnames that Masters applied to his characters.

Other local legends assert that Masters' fictional portrayal of local residents, often in unflattering light, created a lot of embarrassment and aggravation in his hometown. This is offered as an explanation for why he chose not to settle down in Lewistown or Petersburg.

[edit] Adaptations

In 1943, the book was published in Italy during fascism (translated by Fernanda Pivano), and still has an enormous success.
On June 2, 1957, the CBS Radio Network broadcast a radio adaptation of Spoon River Anthology, "Epitaphs", as part of its CBS Radio Workshop series. The adaptation was directed and narrated by William Conrad, with a cast including Virginia Gregg, Jeanette Nolan, Parley Baer, Richard Crenna, John Dehner and John McIntire.
In 1963, Charles Aidman adapted Spoon River Anthology into a theater production that is still widely performed today.
The 1971 Fabrizio De André album Non al denaro, non all'amore né al cielo was inspired by Spoon River Anthology.
In 1987 the Spanish writer Jon Juaristi wrote a poem entitled Spoon River, Euskadi (included in his book Suma de varia intención) to denounce the crimes of the Basque terrorist group ETA.
In 2000, alt-country singer Richard Buckner adapted parts of the Spoon River Anthology for his album The Hill.
in 2005, American composer Karl W. Schindler wrote a multimedia cantata entitled Ghost Voices: Songs From a Cemetery, adapting many of the poems from Spoon River Anthology into the 32-minute work.
In 2006 the American photographer William Willinghton published the book Spoon River, ciao (Dreams Creek, 2006) with pictures of real landscapes described by Edgar Lee Masters (as Spoon River and the little cemetery on the hill where "all, all, are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill"). William Willinghton's images are accompanied by texts by Italian writer and translator Fernanda Pivano.
Songwriter Michael Peter Smith's song "Spoon River" is loosely based on Spoon River Anthology.