SOURCE: “Crossing Spoon River,” in Man in the Mirror: William Marion Reedy and His Magazine, Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 193-216.

In the following excerpt, Putzel examines Masters's friendship with William Marion Reedy, founder of the St. Louis weekly the Mirror, and Reedy's involvement with the publication of Spoon River.

Reedy's friend Edgar Lee Masters came from a country town near Springfield and became Lindsay's friend and biographer. But the contrast between the two could not have been more fundamental. Where Lindsay remained the pastoral innocent, Masters had been engrossed in the contentions of Chicago life even before becoming Clarence Darrow's partner in Governor Altgeld's old law firm. An avowed agnostic, a rake who boasted of his conquests, a fighter who generally quarreled at last with his friends—Masters had only one thing besides Illinois citizenship in common with Vachel Lindsay: a passion for poetry.

In this he was...