About Edgar Lee Masters
 Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, the son of Hardin Wallace Masters, a lawyer, and Emma J. Dexter. Though his father had moved the family briefly to Kansas to set up a law practice, Masters grew up in the western Illinois farmlands where his grandparents had settled in the 1820s. He was educated in the public schools in Petersburg and Lewistown (where he worked as a newspaper printer after school) and spent a year in an academy school hoping to gain admission to Knox College. Instead of entering college, he read law with his father and, after a brief stint as a bill collector in Chicago, formed a law partnership in 1893 with Kickham Scanlan.
Over the next ten years he expressed his Populist views in a series of essays and plays, written under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace. In 1898 he married Helen M. Jenkins, the daughter of a Chicago lawyer; they had three children. In 1903 he joined Clarence Darrow's law firm, where he defended the poor over the next eight years. Some dozen plays and books of poems during this period are undistinguished, serving mostly as political tracts and verse exercises. Extramarital affairs and an argument with Darrow unsettled his personal and professional life from 1908 to 1911, when he went into law practice on his own.
In 1914 Masters began a series of poems about his boyhood experiences in western Illinois, published (under the pseudonym Webster Ford) in Reedy's Mirror (St. Louis). This was the beginning of Spoon River Anthology (1915), the book that would make his reputation and become one of the most popular and widely known works in all of American literature. In "The Genesis of Spoon River" (American Mercury, Jan. 1933), Masters recalls how his interest turned to "combinations of my imagination drawn from the lives of the faithful and tender-hearted souls whom I had known in my youth about Concord, and wherever on Spoon River they existed." Though he would never equal the achievement or fame of Spoon River Anthology, he continued publishing poetry, novels, essays, and biographies for nearly thirty years. The amount and wide range of his production far exceeded its quality, by most accounts, and Masters's place in twentieth-century American literature is still debated.
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