Edgar Lee Masters

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Edgar Lee Masters (August 23, 1868 - March 5, 1950) was an American poet, biographer and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain : A Portrait, Lincoln, The Man, Illinois Poems.

Edgar Lee Masters was born in 1868 in Garnett, Kansas, where his father had briefly moved to set up a law practice, but the family soon moved back to his paternal grandparents' farm near Petersburg in Menard County, Illinois. In 1880 they moved to Lewistown, Illinois, where he attended high school and had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News. The culture around Lewistown and the nearby Spoon River was the inspiration for many of his works, most notably Spoon River Anthology.

After working in his father's law office, he was admitted to the Illinois bar and moved to Chicago, where he established a law partnership with Kickham Scanlan in 1893. In 1898, he married Helen M. Jenkins, the daughter of a lawyer in Chicago, and had three children. During his law partnership with Clarence Darrow, from 1903 to 1908, Masters defended the poor. In 1911, he started his own law firm, despite the three years of unrest (1908-1911) due to extramarital affairs and an argument with Darrow.

It was in 1914 that Masters truly began writing poetry, when he began a series of poems about his childhood experiences in Western Illinois, which was published in Reedy's Mirror.

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