Frontiers

Chapter 3 considers the significance of the 1893 World’s Fair on contemporary notions of the Midwest as representative of the nation’s future. We follow Masters to Chicago, where he worked as a lawyer with Clarence Darrow, campaigned for the perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and failed to find an audience for his reform-focused literature. After struggling to find a venue for his writing, Masters tried to appeal to nascent modernist sensibilities exemplified by Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine. In Spoon River Anthology, first published in Reedy’s Mirror in 1914, Masters synthesized his memories of Petersburg and Lewistown in poetry that emulated the modernist style of younger poets like Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle and he found acceptance among readers of early modernist verse.