Edgar Lee Masters: Bibliography of Secondary Sources

Most of Masters' manuscripts and his letters are in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The University of Chicago and The Newberry Library (Chicago) also house some materials. 

His autobiography up to 1917 is Across Spoon River (1936), reissued by the University of Illinois Press, 1991. There is no full-length biography. Biographical information is found in Gertrude Claytor, "Edgar Lee Masters in the Chelsea Years," Princeton University Library Chronicle (Autumn, 1952); New York Times Obituary, March 6, 1950; Herb Russell, "Edgar Lee Masters' Final Years in the Midwest," Essays in Literature (Fall, 1977); Hardin W. Masters, Edgar Lee Masters: A Biographical Sketchbook about a Famous American Author (1978); Hilary Masters, Last Stands, Notes From Memory (1982), John H. Wrenn and Margaret H. Wrenn, Edgar Lee Masters (1983), and Marcia Lee Masters, The Wind Around the Moon and Other Poems (1986). 

Two useful bibliographies are John T. Flanagan, Edgar Lee Masters: The Spoon River Poet and His Critics (1974) and Frank K. Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters: An Exhibition in Commemoration of His Birth (1970). 

For critical assessment, see Willis Barnstone, Introduction to The New Spoon River (1924); Charles E. Burgess, "Edgar Lee Masters: The Lawyer as Writer," in The Vision of This Land ed. John E. Hallwas and Dennis J. Reader (1976); August Derleth, Three Literary Men (1963); Bernard Duffey, The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters: A Critical Study (1954); Ernest Earnest "Spoon River Revisited" (Western Humanities Review, Winter, 1967); Lois Teal Hartley, Spoon River Revisited (1963); Dale Kramer, Chicago Renaissance: Literary Life in the Midwest 1900-1930 (1966); Ronald Primeau, Beyond Spoon River: The Legagy of Edgar Lee Masters (1981); Max Putzel The Man in the Mirror: William Marion Reedy and His Magazine (1963), Herbert K Russell, ed. (and Introduction to) The Enduring River: Edgar Lee Masters' Uncollected Spoon River Poems (1991); Louis Untermeyer, American Poetry Since 1900 (1923); Michael Yatron, America's Literary Revolt (1959).

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