Epitaphs - Spoon River Anthology

From Hollywood, the CBS Radio Workshop. workshop dedicated to man's imagination, The Theatre of the Mind, presents Epitaphs with

the words from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River anthology, the music of Wolfgang Frankl and your narrator William Conrad. Mr. Conrad. Thank you. More than forty years ago, Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River anthology was first published.

Although this group of subjective epitaphs from an Illinois graveyard is scarcely remembered today, it profoundly affected a generation of American writers, opening their minds to the vast dimensions of the character of our land and its people.

In the years that followed the publication of Spoon River, while we were becoming acquainted with giant after giant Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandberg, The poetry of the quiet bespectacled law partner of Clarence Darrow is all but been forgotten.

We feel that this should not be. And so do a new generation we beg leave to offer a few of the townspeople of Spoon River as Edgarley Masters saw them. They speak from the burial ground on the hill above the village, what they say is often at variants with the words graven upon their tombstones, and at variants too with their

fellow townsmen's opinions of them. For even in the stillness of death they are disturbingly human. None so good nor so bad as he may have seemed while yet alive. There was Robert Fulton Tanner who ran the village hardware store. Looking back he thought he had developed at last a concept of life.

If a man could bite the giant hand that catches and destroys him, as I was bitten by a rat while demonstrating my patent trap in my hardware store that day. But a man can never avenge himself on the monstrous ogre life.