Louis Globe-Democrat, the Chicago Inter-Ocean, and the Peoria Journal. Masters was to send election stories and human-interest pieces to the St. After a while, the old editor, Selah Wheadon, an ex-pastor, let me try my hand at writing a few items.” I was only 15 then, and I hired out at a dollar a week. In 1936, Masters remembered, “As a boy I always hung around the print shop, fascinated by the presses and the smell of printer’s ink. “Without a doubt, the small-town newspaper, with its intimate account of ordinary people and its revelation of countless conflicts and interrelation, had an enormous influence on the poet.” “As with Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, Masters’ newspaper background provided a thrust toward the use of factual material in his literary works,” wrote author/editor John Hallwas in “Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition,” published in 1993. Edgar Lee Masters, who died March 5, 1950, is remembered as the author of “Spoon River Anthology,” but he also was a long-time newspaperman and, eventually, a lawyer.īefore using Lewistown and nearby Petersburg to conjure his imaginary village of Spoon River, exposing conflicts from the grave and expressing his love/hate feelings for the area, Masters wrote sports and obituaries, reviews and news, and wedding and trial stories for the Lewistown News and the Fulton County Ledger.
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