For our themed column on Pavese’s contemporary critique, Iuri Moscardi interviewed professor Jason Stacy about Spoon River America.
Jason Stacy is professor of History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville after receiving his Ph.D. from Loyola University Chicago in 2006. He spent much of his career interested in US print culture, especially the production, dissemination, and reception of literature. For instance, he researched Walt Whitman’s journalism, especially the fifteen years before the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855. The outcome of this interest are his book Walt Whitman’s Multitudes: Labor Reform and Persona in Whitman’s Journalism and the first Leaves of Grass (1840-1855) (2008); the collection of Whitman’s journalism Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism he co-edited in 2015; his facsimile edition of the poet’s third edition of Leaves of Grass (2009) with introduction and annotations; and his participation as contributing editor for the Walt Whitman Archive since 2012. Before becoming a college professor, he taught US history to high school students and he published two US history textbooks (2015, 2020/2024). In 2021, he published Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town (University of Illinois Press) which explained the success of Masters’s masterpiece by analyzing the literary and cultural context surrounding the book and its author. This interview is part of a series of interviews focused on Spoon River Anthology and its relevance for American and Italian readers that inaugurated last month, with Julianne VanWagenen, and will continue in the next months.
Are you aware that Spoon River Anthology is still a bestseller among Italian readers? Could you provide a brief description of the current situation of the book among American readers?
I am aware of the book’s popularity in Italy, and have depended upon the research by Julianne VanWagenen for her knowledge on Spoon River Anthology’s life and legacy there. In October 2023, I gave a keynote address and masterclass in Rome for John Cabot University’s “Italy Reads” program, where high school students throughout Italy read Spoon River Anthology as part of their English language training. I was overjoyed by the excitement about the book from students and their teachers, and was thrilled by the hospitality I received both during the keynote and masterclass. It was wonderful to discover that this very American book had led an Italian life in the 20th century, and I was fascinated by the ways in which Italian readers have interpreted and reinterpreted the book over the last three generations. In fact, I’d argue that there’s an entire area of research to be undertaken on the topic of Spoon River Anthology’s reception and impact on modern Italian history.
But the book is largely forgotten by scholars in the United States. Interest in Spoon River Anthology has waned among literary critics since the 1970s. Nevertheless, the book remains generally popular among lay readers. The book has never been out of print since it first appeared in 1915, and editions are published by a number of trade presses. Also, the Charles Aidman dramatic version of Spoon River Anthology (1963) continues to be performed by community theaters across the country. The Meisner Method of training actors still uses dramatic readings of the book, and a number of artists throughout the 20th century credited the book as an inspiration. I guess I would say that its popularity today in the United States is mixed: it is largely ignored by scholars of American literature, but lives on as a classic for many Americans outside of the academy.
In that talk in Rome you said that your mother, an English teacher working in a small town that was very similar to the imagined Spoon River, “assigned Spoon River Anthology to her students because she thought it would teach them about their lives and it was a way to prepare them for life in a small town”. This seems to contrast with another famous interpretation of these poems, which assigns them universal values. What is the better way to interpret it, as a micro- or a macrocosm?
My mother taught English in a small Illinois town for many years. But she grew up in a large city (Chicago) and for her, at least at first, life in a small town was something of a rude awakening, though she quickly learned to love it. Nevertheless, in the United States, there are many romantic notions about life in small Midwestern towns (consider Main Street USA in Disneyland), and these notions are often contrasted with the assumption that the romantic surface veils a more complex, and often troubling, substrata. The dialectic between the idealized surface and a troubling substrata forms what I called in my book the twentieth-century’s “myth” of the American small town. By myth, here, I mean received opinions that are assumed to be common sense, but exist without the kind of disciplined social scientific study that exposes unexpected complexities inherent in societies. These “myths” aren’t often recognized as mythological until they have become obsolete, which I argue the myth of the American small town became by the 21st century. Once historical, the “common sense” of any given period can be better understood as mythological.
My mother taught English during the last quarter of the 20th century, when the myth of the American small town was still assumed to be common sense. And in that regard, Spoon River Anthology proved to be an ideal book for her, since she hoped that it would expose the “truth” of small-town life for her students. And you’re right, the book does aspire to identify a microcosm in the little town of Spoon River, and this helped my mother’s lessons, since she hoped that the book would both teach her students about the reality of their town, while at the same time situate them within larger human dilemmas and struggles. Their little town, just like Spoon River, contained within it all the complexity of human life, for better and for worse. And, of course, it was also a very handy way to introduce students to modern poems, since its style was simple and clear, and its conceit was compelling.
In your book you stated that “Spoon River Anthology contributed to making the Midwestern small town, for a time, a mythological symbol of the nation itself”. Why Masters’s book was so relevant in this process? Also, how is then possible that foreigners, when they think to the US, imagine big cities and skyscrapers and not a pacific, rural life anymore?
In short, Spoon River Anthology proved to be wildly popular when it was published in 1915. All the major newspapers reviewed the book, modernist authors like Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Hilda Doolittle praised it, and popular audiences purchased it. However, by 1920, though still popular, it had not yet achieved its place in the sub-genre of American literature known as the “Revolt from the Village,” where authors like Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, and Sinclair Lewis wrote fiction that portrayed the myth I described above. And while these authors never considered themselves part of a single literary movement, the prominent literary critic, Carl Van Doren, characterized them as part of a village “revolt” against the bromides of American small towns in a well-known review in The Nation entitled “The Revolt from the Village: 1920” and claimed that Masters’s book set the mold. Van Doren’s publication, then, solidified Masters’s reputation as the originator of a short literary trend in the first quarter of the 20th century (though Masters rejected the category) and most anthologies still place him within this movement.
But I can’t answer why others outside of the United States imagine the United States as largely urban today. In fact, much of the United States is still quite rural, though most Americans no longer work in agriculture (and haven’t for over 100 years). I wonder if the American media that we export to other countries portrays the United States in this way, and therefore gives the impression of the nation as largely urbanized. However, for many Americans, there are compelling “myths” surrounding cities as well, and this might account for the popularity of television and film portrayals of urban life in American media.
Italian academia is not focusing much on Masters; what is the situation within the American universities? Are there any relevant scholars who focused on this author and this book?
As I mentioned above, Masters is largely forgotten by literary critics. This is a product of the kinds of scholarly trends that shape all disciplines. Since the 1990s, poets who represent white, heteronormative, male perspectives have been generally downplayed by those on the cutting edge of literary scholarship to give some space and scholarly attention to authors and poets largely overlooked during the 20th century. Likewise, modernism, as a genre, and New Criticism, its attendant analytical method, gave way to postmodern critical frameworks, as well as New Historicist methods of interpreting literature. In sum, Spoon River Anthology has dropped out of scholarly attention for the reasons many other works have: scholars are interested in new things and new ways of interpreting them.
But New Modernist Studies, a relatively new subfield of criticism, which considers, among other topics, popular forms of modernist literature during the 20th century, has gained some traction over the last twenty-five years or so. John Timbermann Newcomb’s How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse (2013) is especially useful in this regard. And while Spoon River Anthology has been largely ignored by New Modernist Studies scholars, I’m hopeful that it will soon find its place as a useful work for interpreting the production and reception of popular modernist works in the early 20th century. Caroline Gelmi has already done some great work in this regard, along with Julianne Van Wagenen.
In the talk mentioned before, you remembered that your first encounter with Spoon River happened when you were thirteen: approaching all these dead characters scared you. With this book, Masters gave shape to a type of modern poetry: how much did the artifice of the speaking dead contribute to the modernity of his poetry?
I think the conceit that all of the speakers in Spoon River Anthology are dead is the heart of what makes it compelling. The dead tell us something we all want to know: what will happen? And I think their answer is profoundly modern: subjective experience is all. The speakers in Spoon River Anthology experience subjectivity in the afterlife, acquiring few answers to their lives’ questions except those that grow from their own experience and character, effectively reminding us that our lives are all there is. This grim cosmology, or perhaps a poetic thanatology, strikes me as very modern.
A fundamental aspect of Masters’s life and poetry is the reference to the pioneer era, and the myth of the frontier is still relevant in American culture, with political connotations. Are the myths of the frontier and of the small town related? Why did you focus on the small town and not on the frontier in your book?
The myth of the American frontier is the backdrop to Spoon River Anthology. Note how many of the most sympathetic characters (Lucinda Matlock, Aaron Hatfield) are of the “pioneering” generation of frontier Illinois, as were Masters’s paternal grandparents. I discuss this quite a bit in Spoon River America, but good scholarship on the American frontier myth has existed for at least three generations in American historiography. Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) immediately comes to mind.
In the last part of your book you mentioned the influence of Spoon River on literature and other media: do you think that the book is having an influence on literature, cinema, or other media in the 21st century, too?
I think there are some echoes of the myth of the American small town in 21st century popular media. In my book, I discuss series like Stranger Things, which takes place in rural Indiana, and films like Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which take place in Minnesota and Missouri respectively. These examples of popular art exhibit some of the attributes of the myth, as I understand it. However, as the Midwestern small town ceased to be normative for Americans in the late 20th century, the myth no longer functioned like common sense, and small towns were reinterpreted, as I argue in the book, as either surreal or exotic places. I don’t think this reflects the reality of American small towns any more than the myths of the 20th century did, but these myths nevertheless shape perceptions and have social and political valence in our times. It’s difficult for me to say what is the history of these modern myths about American small towns since they still function as received opinion and common sense for many Americans. However, I’m confident that they will prove to be of analytical interest to future cultural historians, as Spoon River Anthology has for me.
Dialogues with Pavese: Mark Pietralunga
An interview with Mark Pietralunga, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University, Tallahassee (USA).
Dialogues with Pavese: Tim Parks
The good translator reconstructs the original text: read our interview with Tim Parks, author of a new translation of “The Moon And The Bonfires”.
Dialogues with Pavese: Caterina Bernardini
Beyond national borders, in search for interconnections and mutual influences: Caterina Bernardini presents her decade-long research on Walt Whitman, subject of Cesare Pavese’s dissertation.