Across Spoon River: An Autobiography was published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1936. The memoir covers Masters’s life from childhood in Garnett, Kansas, and Petersburg and Lewiston, Illinois, through his legal career in Chicago, his literary breakthrough with Spoon River Anthology in 1915, and his subsequent decades of prolific but increasingly neglected output.
The autobiography’s principal value is documentary: it reveals the sources of Spoon River Anthology in Masters’s direct observation of the people and events of his Illinois communities. The characters who speak from the graveyard were drawn from real people — neighbors, relatives, clients from his father’s law practice — and Masters identifies many of the originals and explains the transformations he made.
The book also documents the literary culture of Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s: the Renaissance period that produced Masters, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson, and others. Masters portrays this community with a mixture of affection and resentment — he felt that Sandburg in particular received recognition that properly belonged to him, and the autobiography settles several old scores.
The later chapters are marked by bitterness. Masters felt that the literary establishment had abandoned him after his early success, that critics were unjust in dismissing his later work, and that America did not properly honor its poets. This complaint has some justice — Masters published over fifty books after Spoon River Anthology, and most received little attention — but the autobiography’s tone of grievance diminishes its effectiveness.
Collecting Across Spoon River
First edition (Farrar & Rinehart, New York, 1936): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30