Fun Facts Friday: Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters (23 August, 1868 – 5 March, 1950) was a poet and biographer from Kansas.

Books by Edgar Lee Masters*

1. Mr. Masters, born in Garnett, KS grew up in Illinois where he finished high school.
2. His first published poems were under the name Dexter Wallace (Dexter was his mother’s maiden name, and Wallace was his father’s middle name).
3. He was admitted to the Illinois bar after working in his father’s law office.
4. Chicago was where Mr. Masters opened his first law partnership.
5. Later on, when he established himself as a poet, he wrote under the name Webster Ford.
6. A series of poems about his childhood in Western Illinois appeared in a St. Louis literary journal called Reedy’s Mirror. Contributors to the journal included Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Theodore Dreiser.
7. By 1915 the poems were bound and sold as the Spoon River Anthology.
8. Mr. Masters published sever other books of poems, but none were as successful as the Spoon River Anthology.
9. Mr. Masters’ daughter, Marcia, became a poet and son, Hilary became a novelist.
10. Hilary and Hardin, half brothers, wrote a memoir of their father.

Books by Edgar Lee Masters*

Zohar — Man of la Book
*Ama­zon links point to an affil­i­ate account