Who is Benjamin Pantier?

Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, and he grew up in the small towns of Lewistown and Petersburg, Illinois. The author of 40 books of poetry and prose, Masters is best remembered for his great collection Spoon River Anthology (1915), a sequence of…

What is the theme in Spoon River Anthology?

The theme of Spoon River Anthology is that residents of America’s small towns have provocative secrets to tell about themselves or others—secrets which, for the most part, the residents wish to keep hidden during their lifetimes. The residents of Spoon River decide to reveal their secrets from the grave.

When was Spoon River Anthology banned?

1974
The book was banned from Lewistown schools and libraries until 1974. Even Masters’s mother, who sat on the Lewistown library board, voted for the ban.

How is Reuben related to Mr and Mrs Benjamin Pantier?

In Edgar Lee Masters’ American classic, Spoon River Anthology, the epitaph of “Reuben Pantier,” son of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Pantier, tells Reuben’s story as he addresses his high school teacher, Miss Emily Sparks.

Why did Edgar Lee Masters wrote Spoon River Anthology?

In his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1936), Edgar Lee Masters reports that he started writing the poems of his Spoon River Anthology after talking over former days with his mother, who was visiting her lawyer-who-wished-to-be-poet son in Chicago during May 1914.

When was Spoon River Anthology written?

1915
When Spoon River Anthology was published in 1915, Edgar Lee Masters shattered the myth of small-town America as the bastion of American virtue.

What is unique about about Spoon River Anthology?

It was inspired by the epigrams in the Greek Anthology. The Spoon River Anthology is a collection of 245 free-verse epitaphs in the form of monologues. They are spoken from beyond the grave by former residents of a dreary, confining small town like those Masters himself had known during his Illinois boyhood.

What is the plot of Spoon River Anthology?

Spoon River Anthology is a collection of poems that describe life – and death – in a small town. Each poem is a monologue delivered by a resident of Spoon River, describing events in their lives, and the circumstances that led to their occasionally untimely end.

Why is it called the Spoon River?

The river’s name is probably a translation of emiquon, an Illinois and Potawatomi Indian word referring to the mussel shells they used as spoons. Dickson Mounds, a rich archaeological area, is near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois.

Who named the Spoon River?

The river drains largely agricultural prairie country between Peoria and Galesburg. The river is noted for giving its name to the fictional Illinois town in the 1916 poetry work Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, who was from Lewistown, which is near the river.

Is Spoon River a real place?

In his thinly veiled fictional town of Spoon River, situated in central Illinois near Lewistown, where Masters grew up, the honest, hardworking, chaste, and churchgoing live amidst corrupt bankers, abusive husbands, unfulfilled wives, sexual deviants, and failed dreamers.

Why is Spoon River called Spoon River?