Spoon River at Duncan Mills. This new concrete bridge is right where the old wooden covered bridge was when Edgar Lee Masters the Spoon River poet who wrote the Spoon River Anthology back in 1914 crossed the river on his way to his new home in Lewiston where his father eventually became the Fulton County States Attorney in the 1890s. The wooden bridge is illustrated on the cover of his autobiography, Across Spoon River. Master's anthology was an instant hit with the public in 1914 but he was never to produce any other volume as popular as Spoon River Anthology even though he was one of the most prolific writers in American literature.
I read this book back in junior high and fell in love with the Spoon River area ever since. This book was actually banned from the Lewiston Public Library from when the book came out until probably the 1940s or 50s because the poems contained therein were in many cases unflattering exposes/stories of local people and dignitaries which the local people could attach a real person to the subject of the particular poem. Masters had changed the names of the people to protect them...but as I say the locals knew the facts behind the stories and so could come up with the real names.
Many critics called him the reincarnation of Chaucer because of how he portrayed the ordinary man in his work. Remember the Canterbury Tales? Very similar to Master's work.
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