Mitch Miller was published by Macmillan in 1920. The novel draws on Masters’s boyhood in Petersburg and Lewiston, Illinois — the same communities that would generate the characters of Spoon River Anthology. The narrator, Skeet (clearly Masters himself), tells the story of his friendship with Mitch Miller, a charismatic, adventurous boy who leads Skeet through a series of exploits modeled on Tom Sawyer.
Masters’s relationship to Twain is explicit and complex: the boys are consciously playing Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, imitating literary models in their real lives. But Masters’s Illinois is harsher than Twain’s Missouri: the poverty is more grinding, the violence more real, the adult world more threatening. Mitch Miller dies at the end of the novel — killed in a railroad accident — and his death is presented not as melodrama but as the ordinary, brutal intrusion of adult reality into childhood’s protected space.
The novel is most interesting as a companion piece to Spoon River Anthology: it shows the same communities from a child’s perspective, before the adult betrayals and disappointments that the epitaphs record. The reader who knows Spoon River can recognize the prototypes of its characters in the adults who populate Skeet’s world — seen here from below, through a child’s incomplete understanding.
The book was commercially successful on the strength of Masters’s name, but critics found it less compelling than his poetry. Masters was fundamentally a poet — his prose lacks the compression and intensity that distinguish his verse.
Collecting Mitch Miller
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1920): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $8–$20