Spoon River Anthology (1915, by Edgar Lee Masters) is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town.
Each poem is an epitaph of a dead citizen, delivered by the dead person. Each speaks about the sorts of things one might expect: some recite histories and turning points, others make observations of life from the outside, and petty ones complain of the treatment of their graves, while a few tell how they really died. Speaking without reason to lie or fear of the consequences, they construct a picture of life in their town that is shorn of façades. The interplay of various villagers — e.g. a bright and successful man crediting his parents for all he's accomplished, and an old woman weeping because the man is secretly her illegitimate child — forms a gripping, if not pretty, whole. Many of the characters that make appearances in Spoon River Anthology were based on real people that Masters knew or heard of in the two towns where he grew up, Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois.
Each poem is an epitaph of a dead citizen, delivered by the dead person. Each speaks about the sorts of things one might expect: some recite histories and turning points, others make observations of life from the outside, and petty ones complain of the treatment of their graves, while a few tell how they really died. Speaking without reason to lie or fear of the consequences, they construct a picture of life in their town that is shorn of façades. The interplay of various villagers — e.g. a bright and successful man crediting his parents for all he's accomplished, and an old woman weeping because the man is secretly her illegitimate child — forms a gripping, if not pretty, whole. Many of the characters that make appearances in Spoon River Anthology were based on real people that Masters knew or heard of in the two towns where he grew up, Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois.