Edgar Lee Masters

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Edgar Lee Masters on a United States Postal Service stamp

Edgar Lee Masters (born August 23, 1868 in Garnett , Kansas , † March 5, 1950 in Petersburg , Illinois ) was an American writer who was known as the author of the volume of poetry Spoon River Anthology .

Life

The son of a lawyer grew up on his grandparents' farm in Petersburg, Menard County , Illinois. When he was twelve, the family relocated to Lewistown , where he attended high school and published first articles in the Chicago Daily News . The city and its surroundings (the Oak Hill cemetery, the nearby Spoon River) later provided inspiration for his literary work, particularly the Spoon River Anthology , first published in 1914 in Reedy's Mirror in St. Louis , then as a book in 1915. The poems of the collection, created in the style of the Anthologia Graeca , are written as obituaries for around 200 people in the fictional small town of Spoon River in the Midwest - obituaries that come from the dead themselves. Most people correspond to real originals from Petersburg and Lewistown (for example Ann Rutledge, who, according to rumors, was a childhood sweetheart of Abraham Lincoln and is buried in Petersburg). The book was a great success, but also made enemies for him in his closer home, since he had relentlessly portrayed the narrow-mindedness of the small townspeople.

Masters published books with poetry before (first in 1898) and published more until 1942, but could no longer build on the success of the Spoon River Anthology . He also wrote several plays, novels and biographies by Lincoln, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain . In 1936 he wrote the autobiography Across Spoon River .

Professionally, Masters worked as a lawyer, first in his father's law firm, then in Chicago, where he had a law firm with a partner in 1893. a. from 1903 to 1908 in the firm of the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow . From 1911 he had his own law firm.

Masters was married to Helen Jenkins from 1898, with whom he had three children.

On his tombstone in Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg there are some verses from his "Tomorrow is my birthday" (1918):

Good friends, let's to the fields ...
After a little walk and by your pardon,
I think I'll sleep, there is no sweeter thing.
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep.
I am a dream out of a blessed sleep-
Let's walk, and hear the lark.

In 1936 he received the Mark Twain Silver Medal, in 1941 the Medal of the Poetry Society of America , in 1942 the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets and in 1944 the Shelley Memorial Award. Since 1918 he was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Aftermath

The Italian composer Mario Peragallo wrote the scenic madrigal La Collina , based on the Spoon River Anthology , which premiered in 1947.

The German composer Wolfgang Jacobi set four poems from the Spoon River Anthology to music in 1956 and created the song cycle Die Toten von Spoon River for baritone and accordion.

The Italian cantautore Fabrizio De André adapted some poems from the Spoon River Anthology for his album Non al denaro non all'amore nè al cielo (1971).

Writings and translations

  • Spoon River Anthology. St. Louis 1915.
    • Die Toten von Spoon River , DTV 1968, Piper 1987. New edition: Translation by Claudio Maira, Verlag Jung und Jung, Salzburg 2020.
  • The New Spoon River. New York 1924.
  • Across Spoon River. To Autobiography. New York 1936.

Web links

Commons : Edgar Lee Masters  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Alois Pfohl : Epigraphik, Epigrammatik. In: Technical prose - Crossing borders. Volume 10, 2014, pp. 19–35, here: p. 21 (on Edgar Lee Masters).
  2. ^ Members: Edgar Lee Masters. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 13, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Masters, Edgar Lee
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Garnett , Kansas
DATE OF DEATH March 5, 1950
Place of death Petersburg , Illinois