Essay

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters was the son of Emma J. Dexter and Hardin Wallace Masters. He was born on the 23rd of August in Garnett, Kansas. His family had to move there because of his father to set up a law practice. Later on, masters moved back to western Illinois farmland with his grandparents. He attended public schools and where he work after school in Petersburg and Lewiston. He spent 1 year in The Knox Academy and was hoping to get an admission to Knox College. But since his family cannot afford his finance for his education, "he read the law with his father" and took a part time job as a bill collector in Chicago, and finally found a law partnership with Kickhan Scanlan in 1893.

In 1898, he met Helen M. Jenkins, the daughter of a Chicago lawyer, and soon married her and had three children. He joined Clarence Darrow"s law firm in 1903, where he gave justice for the poor for over the next 8 years. During 1914, Masters started his series of poems about his childhood experiences in western, Illinois and was published under the false name of Webster Ford. That"s where the start of River Spoon Anthology in 1915, where the book became the most well known in all of American Literature. Since then, he continued publishing poetries, novels, essays, and biographies for almost thirty years.

In the years of his popularity because of his work, Masters"s personal life became unfortunate. While he was trying to balance his work as a writer and as a lawyer. Masters got divorced and was thinking to go back to his hometown in Chicago but he thinks that it was impossible to go back. Instead, he went to New York, and after they settled the divorce, Masters was remarried to his wife, Ellen Coyne Masters. She was much young than Masters, and her father was an immigrant from Ireland. Masters had to resign because of his bad health and soon moved in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Throughout 1940"s, he received many literary awards, including the Academy of...