Mitch Miller (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Named after the author’s best friend from childhood, Masters’s first (1920) novel is a charming tale of two boys growing up in the Mississippi River Valley in 1900. Mitch sets out to relive Tom Sawyer in what one critic called the best boy’s story of the generation.

Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) wrote more than twenty-five books of verse, four plays, several novels, an autobiography, and biographies of Lincoln, Twain, and Whitman. He also had a successful career as a lawyer in Chicago. Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, a collection of short free-form poems describing life and skewering hypocrisy in a small American town, is his best remembered work and a rare poetry bestseller.