Spoon River Anthology

“All, all are sleeping on the hill”—but the dead of Spoon River have plenty to say. From the clown and the fighter to the women whose lives the village misread, each voice breaks the silence of the grave.

In Edgar Lee Masters’s 1915 collection, a fictional American town speaks through the people buried in its cemetery. In spare, searching free verse, a condemned robber measures himself against a banker, a wife challenges her husband’s account, and a forgotten judge wonders why a drunkard has the finer monument. Beneath the epitaphs and respectable names lie old grievances, thwarted hopes, and truths the living would rather leave buried. As one voice complicates the next, whose version of Spoon River will you believe?

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