The second work was less successful and received poorer reviews. Masters capitalized on the success of The Spoon River Anthology with the 1924 sequel The New Spoon River, in which Spoon River became a suburb of Chicago and its inhabitants have been urbanized. (Masters claimed 'My mother disliked the anthology] my father adored it.') Despite this, the anthology remained widely read in Lewistown local historian Kelvin Sampson notes that 'Every family in Lewistown probably had a sheet of paper or a notebook hidden away with their copy of the Anthology, saying who was who in town.' Even Masters's mother, who sat on the Lewistown library board, voted for the ban. The book was banned from Lewistown schools and libraries until 1974. Meanwhile, those who lived in the Spoon River region objected to their portrayal in the anthology, particularly as so many of the poems' characters were based on real people.

Such a writer and book are realized here.' The book sold 80,000 copies over four years, making it an international bestseller by the standards of the day. The people whose faces look out from the pages of the book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as mysterious as in the old home valley where the writer came from.

Ezra Pound's review of the Spoon River poems begins: 'At last At last America has discovered a poet.' Carl Sandburg's review is similarly glowing: 'Once in a while a man comes along who writes a book that has his own heart-beats in it. Spoon River Anthology was a critical and commercial success. Louis, Missouri, literary journal Reedy's Mirror, under the pseudonym Webster Ford.

The poems originally were published in 1914 in the St. Many of the poems contain cross-references that create an unabashedly candid tapestry of the community. The collection includes 212 separate characters, in all providing 244 accounts of their lives, losses, and manner of death. The aim of the poems is to demystify rural and small town American life. Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free verse poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the Spoon River, which ran near Masters' home town of Lewistown, Illinois.

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