Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy Gregory Brown Jason Stacy, Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 234 pp. $27.95 (paper). In Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, Jason Stacy states that he has "treated Spoon River Anthology like a historical subject" but cautions the reader that the work's "significance lies not only in its history but also in its enduring life as a book that people read" (173). Stacy's analysis of the text is sensitive to the literary aspects of Masters's work, and it is thus useful and engaging to literary critics and historians alike. Stacy begins by tracing two distinct origin myths of the American small town: the New England version and the midwestern one. The myth of the New England small town has roots that reach back before the American Revolution and defines itself as moral, industrious, and cooperative. The midwestern small town, on the other hand, is steeped in the frontier mythos popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner and emphasizes rugged individualism. These rival mythologies "both featured an established small municipality," but "the New England village served as a founding enterprise [of the nation] and thereby preserved original values" while the "Midwestern town was the result of a mythical frontier experience" (33). Both contrasted with urban centers such as New York City, which were portrayed as "dens of hypocrisy and vice" (11). Masters's family history intersected with both myths due to Illinois's patterns of settlement. On both sides of his family tree, Masters's ancestors moved into Illinois to distance themselves from slavery; however, Masters's branch of the family shifted their political sympathies to the South after the Civil War due to increases in federal power and taxation. Stacy notes that Hardin Masters, Edgar Lee's father, "sought to enlist on the side of the North" at the age of sixteen, but by the end of the conflict he [End Page 206] supported the South, and Edgar Lee was named after the famous southern general (38). Hardin Masters was haunted by his reputation as a southern sympathizer; rumors that he had been a Copperhead cost him prestige and business. This opprobrium, Stacy demonstrates, is the seed of the character of the exile, a major trope of Spoon River. In the central chapters of Spoon River America, Stacy synthesizes the familial and cultural currents that surround the creation of Edgar Lee Master's Anthology. As Masters was turning his attention away from practicing law and fully toward a literary career, he moved to Chicago, which had become an important cultural and literary center. There, Masters became acquainted with the "'Little Room,' an informal club of artists, social reformers, and philanthropists" (61). Among the members of the Little Room was Harriet Monroe, the future editor of Poetry; nevertheless, Masters was uncomfortable among this society and faulted them for what he perceived as "haughty exclusiveness" (61). Instead, cultivating an outsider status he would uphold for the rest of his life, Masters preferred the society of the more libertine "Press Club." Through close readings of several poems, Stacy identifies character types such as the moralistic fraud, the libertine, and the exile. The character of the exile fits well with Masters's conception of himself as both a Midwesterner and a populist in post-Civil War America. This character type was also key to the popular success of Spoon River Anthology. The necessity for the exile type was clear to Masters's contemporaries: Stacy quotes a review of Masters's subsequent book, Songs and Satires (1916), wherein T. S. Eliot notes that Masters requires a "personage … detached from himself in order to give his particular meditative irony its opportunity" (113). The detached, meditative tone of Spoon River Anthology, together with its popular if imitable style, allowed readers to take from the work what they wanted. Through the concluding chapters, Stacy demonstrates how the myths that led to Spoon River Anthology continued through the twentieth century. Disneyland commercialized the small town, and...