The New Spoon River was published by Boni & Liveright in 1924. The book returns to the format of the original Spoon River Anthology — free-verse monologues spoken by the dead of a small Illinois town — adding 321 new epitaphs that extend the community’s story into the twentieth century.
The new poems address subjects absent from the 1915 collection: the Great War and its psychological damage to returning soldiers, the influenza pandemic of 1918, Prohibition and its corruptions, the decline of rural communities as young people migrated to cities, the growth of industrial capitalism and its exploitation of labor, and the Red Scare’s suppression of political dissent. The scope is broader and more explicitly political than the original.
The problem, as critics immediately noted, was that the original Spoon River Anthology derived much of its power from surprise: no one had written about small-town America this way before. By 1924, the “revolt from the village” was an established literary movement — Anderson, Lewis, and others had followed Masters’s lead — and the revelations of hypocrisy and repression no longer shocked. The form itself had become familiar, and familiarity diminished its impact.
Masters also lacked the concentrated energy of the original: written in a white heat of inspiration over less than a year, the first collection had a unity and intensity that the sequel — produced more deliberately over several years — could not match. The individual poems are competent, sometimes excellent, but the cumulative effect is diffuse rather than devastating.
Collecting The New Spoon River
First edition (Boni & Liveright, New York, 1924): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40