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"A literary and cultural milestone, Spoon River Anthology captured an idea of the rural Midwest that became a bedrock myth of life in small-town America. Jason Stacy places the book within the atmosphere of its time and follows its progress as the poetry took root and thrived. Published by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915, Spoon River Anthology won praise from modernists while becoming an ongoing touchstone for American popular culture. Stacy charts the ways readers embraced, debated, and reshaped Masters's work in literary controversies and culture war skirmishes; in films and other media that over time saw the small town as idyllic then conflicted then surreal; and as the source of three archetypes-populist, elite, and exile-that endure across the landscape of American culture in the twenty-first century. A wide-ranging reconsideration of a literary landmark, Spoon River America tells the story of how a Midwesterner's poetry helped change a nation's conception of itself"--
List of contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Origin Stories
2. The Premodern Midwest
3. Frontiers: Closed and Opened
4. Rampant Yokelisms
5. Reception
6. The Village Revolt
7. Main Street, U.S.A.
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Back cover
About the author
Jason Stacy is a professor of history and social science pedagogy at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. He is the author of
Walt Whitman's Multitudes: Labor Reform and Persona in Whitman's Journalism and the First Leaves of Grass,
1840-1855 and editor of
Leaves of Grass, 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition.
