In the Library
Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters, 1915
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 246
- Length
- Length 38k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
All, all are sleeping on the hill.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
About the book
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley? All, all are sleeping on the hill, and then, one by one, they sit up and say what really happened. More than two hundred citizens of a small Illinois town speak their own epitaphs here, in free verse as plain as a headstone, and having nothing left to lose they tell the thing they held back for a lifetime: the botched abortion, the bank that swallowed the town's savings, the marriage kept up for decades over nothing but loathing. The genius of it is that the voices contradict one another, so a wife's account collides with her husband's and the true history of the place assembles itself out of testimony no living person would ever have given. Fiddler Jones ends with forty acres, a broken fiddle and not one regret. Then Lucinda Matlock, ninety-six years old with twelve children behind her, rounds on you for calling life sorrowful. It takes life to love Life.