Edgar Lee Masters' House
4853 S Kenwood Ave (Hyde Park)
This is the house where Masters wrote Spoon River Anthology, a series of 212 free verse epitaphs of the colorful denizens of the fictional Illinois town. Mastered modeled Spoon River after his Central Illinois hometown of Lewiston. A series of those fictional epitaphs were based on Masters’s own extramarital affairs, which eventually (in part) led him to leave (in 1923) the Kenwood house (and his family) to take up full-time literary pursuits at New York City’s Chelsea Hotel.
Masters moved to Chicago at the age of 24, at first working for the Edison Company. Six years later, he married Hyde Parker Helen Jenkins, daughter of a high-ranking Chicago railroad administrator. They spent their early married years living in Helen’s parents’ house on Drexel Boulevard. In 1903, Masters became a law partner of Clarence Darrow, a partnership that became ever more contentious over the years, despite the firm’s high-profile success with clients ranging from Leopold and Loeb, to Eugene Debs, to John Scopes, to the Haymarket rioters. Masters, like Darrow, had literary ambitions—he published Book of Verses in 1898 and Songs and Sonnets in 1910, but neither gained traction commercially or critically. Masters’s breakthrough as a poet came after he and his family moved into the Kenwood House in 1909. In 1914, the poems that would become Spoon River Anthology appeared in serial form in the St. Louis literary magazine Reedy’s Mirror.
Masters wrote 39 books in addition to his famous anthology. His biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain, as well as several plays, novels and poetry collections, were modestly successful, but none of his other work would equal that of Spoon River Anthology. He returned to Chicago in his later years and died in 1950 at a Melrose Park nursing home.
Helen and children remained in the Kenwood house another 25 years after Masters left in 1923. Ruth Fuerst and Jim Block have lived in the house since they purchased it in 1986.
