Together they managed to move the focus of American literature from New York and New England into middle America, helping pave the way for such Midwestern natives as Ernest Hemingway and F. But when the “Spoon River Anthology” was published in 1914, it was the leading publication from a group of writers known as the Chicago Renaissance, whose members also included the likes of Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Theodore Dreiser. Masters, who was also Clarence Darrow’s law partner from 1903-1908, is now a mere footnote in early twentieth-century American literature. These stories were told in the form of 244 poems which were published in the “Spoon River Anthology” by Edgar Lee Masters. Tales that took the myth of the moral, upright, All-American small town and portrayed it as a cesspool of hypocrisy, faded hopes and corrupted dreams. Tales of adultery, lust, homosexuality, boredom, malice, avarice and greed. After all, if the prisoners escaped, where would they go?īut in Lewistown’s Oak Hill Cemetery there are gravestones with names and, most of all, stories. A sleepy town nestled in the rolling hills of Central Illinois so typical that during World War II they built a German POW camp, Camp Ellis, just to the east.
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