Edgar Lee Masters, American author and lawyer, is mainly remembered for his Spoon River Anthology, a collection of free verse about small-town American life.

Edgar Lee Masters was born on Aug. 23, 1869, in Garnett, Kans. A year later his father's law practice failed and the family moved to the grandfather's Illinois farm. Edgar's father won appointment as state's attorney in Petersburg, and there the young boy started school. In 1880 the family moved to Lewistown near the Spoon River. Masters continued his schooling, worked in a printer's office, and reported for local newspapers. He read James Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Burns, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote poetry, and read law in his father's office. In 1889 he entered Knox College, but his father refused help, so he returned to law in Lewistown. Admitted to the bar in 1891, in 1892 he left for Chicago.

Masters entered a law partnership in 1893 and succeeded professionally, socially, and financially. He married Helen Jenkins in 1898 and published A Book of Verse. He was active in Democratic party politics, traveled west in 1904, and in 1906 toured Europe. He contributed to Reedy's Mirror and met novelist Theodore Dreiser. Masters's next two volumes—The Blood of the Prophets (1905) and Songs and Sonnets (1910)—were published under pseudonyms. Between 1907 and 1911 he wrote four plays. When his second law partner defaulted in 1910, Masters set up his own office. When Poetry magazine started publication in Chicago in 1912, he joined its coterie, meeting Carl Sandburg and others.

Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1915) drew on the values and frustrations of his youth in Lewistown, the style of the Greek Anthology, and contemporary experiments in free verse or rhythmical prose. In it, Masters reveals the spiritual impoverishment of the small midwestern town as its dead speak of their repressed, frightened, hypocritical, stoical, and occasionally fulfilled lives and sometimes contrast hardy pioneer days with the decadent present