“Spoon River Anthology” (1915) by Edgar Lee Masters, a collection of autobiographical verse monologues in epitaph form, was named by Eliot Weinberger as the “century’s most influential book of American poetry” alongside T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land.” A new book on Masters from University of Illinois Press is a good occasion for examining the neglected subject of Spoon River’s Jews.
An attorney who fought for workers’ rights, Masters has been described as a “violent antisemite,” possibly in part due to his association with the novelist Theodore Dreiser, who did indeed loathe Jews.
Yet Masters had a more complex rapport with Yiddishkeit, as might be expected from a leftist who worked as law partner of Clarence Darrow. Darrow was so philosemitic that he wrote a short story, “Little Louis Epstine” about a Jewish paperboy who lost one hand in an accident (“He was run over by a beer wagon when he was a baby”) and the other to frostbite.