Although born in Kansas, Masters grew up in Illinois, where he was educated at Petersburg and Lewistown. Rather than enter college, he studied law with his father and in 1893, established his own law partnership. He began to write essays and plays at this time, under the pseudonym of Dexter Wallace, while continuing to practice law. In 1903, he joined the law firm of Clarence Darrow, where he remained until 1911, when he again set up his own practice. In 1914, he began publishing a series of poems in Reedy's Mirror, which were subsequently collected the following year into Spoon River Anthology. The Anthology was an immediate success and became one of the most popular American books of its day. While Masters continued to write at a prodigious rate for the rest of his life, none of his subsequent works achieved the fame of Spoon River. His other main works include Songs and Satires (1916), The Great Valley (1916), Toward the Gulf (1918), Starved Rock (1919), Mitch Miller (1920), The Open Sea (1921), The New Spoon River (1924), Kit O'Brien (1927), The Fate of the Jury (1929), Lincoln: The Man (1931), The Serpent in the Wilderness (1933), Poems of the People (1936), The New World (1937), The Tide of Time (1937), More People (1939) and The Sangamon (1942). |
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