From Main Street to Stranger Things, how poetry changed our idea of small town life

A literary and cultural milestone, Spoon River Anthology captured an idea of the rural Midwest that became a bedrock myth of life in small-town America. Jason Stacy places the book within the atmosphere of its time and follows its progress as the poetry took root and thrived. Published by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915, Spoon River Anthology won praise from modernists while becoming an ongoing touchstone for American popular culture. Stacy charts the ways readers embraced, debated, and reshaped Masters's work in literary controversies and culture war skirmishes; in films and other media that over time saw the small town as idyllic then conflicted then surreal; and as the source of three archetypes—populist, elite, and exile—that endure across the landscape of American culture in the twenty-first century.

A wide-ranging reconsideration of a literary landmark, Spoon River America tells the story of how a Midwesterner's poetry helped change a nation's conception of itself.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Origin Stories 2. The Premodern Midwest 3. Frontiers: Closed and Opened 4. Rampant Yokelisms 5. Reception 6. The Village Revolt 7. Main Street, U.S.A. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Back cover |"Jason Stacy's Spoon River America sets a new benchmark for what scholarship on Spoon River Anthology might look like and what it might do. Its approach to Spoon River is fantastically stimulating in showing how Master's most famous and popular work remains a site for telling new stories of US cultural production and myth-making." —American Literary History
"Written in a clear, engaging style, Jason Stacy's Spoon River America is a deep and careful historical analysis of Masters's work, its origins, and its influence. It contributes to several areas of scholarship including Modernism and twentieth-century poetry, myths of the American small town, literary history and pedagogy, and issues of race." —Middle West
"Highly recommend this extensively researched and engaging book, Spoon River America to American culture scholars and teachers and to all who love Spoon River Anthology." —Journal of American Culture
|Jason Stacy is a professor of history and social science pedagogy at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. He is the author of Walt Whitman's Multitudes: Labor Reform and Persona in Whitman's Journalism and the First Leaves of Grass, 1840–1855 and editor of Leaves of Grass, 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition.