Children of the Market Place

Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) was an American poet, biographer and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology (1915), The New Star Chamber and Other Essays (1904), Songs and Satires (1916), The Great Valley (1916), The Serpent in the Wilderness: An Obscure Tale (1933), The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait (1938), Lincoln: The Man (1931), and Illinois Poems (1941). In all, he published twelve plays, twentyone books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman. In 1880 his family moved to Lewistown, Illinois, where he attended high school and had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News. The culture around Lewistown, in addition to the town's cemetery at Oak Hill, and the nearby Spoon River were the inspirations for many of his works, most notably Spoon River Anthology, his most famous and acclaimed work. It gained a huge popularity, but shattered his position as a respectable member of establishment. His other works include Toward the Gulf (1918), Mitch Miller (1920) and Children of the Market Place (1922).