Edgar Lee Masters was born in Kansas and reared in Petersburg and Lewiston, Illinois, the "Spoon River country" which he later made famous in his collection of apocryphal epitaphs written in colloquial free verse entitled Spoon River Anthology, published in 1914. In 1892 he moved to Chicago, where he practiced law and began to develop his interest and skill in writing. In 1920 he turned to literature as a full-time career, leaving Chicago and settling in New York City in 1921. Masters wrote a great deal of poetry, as well as novels, plays, and historical and biographical studies, including works on Lincoln (1931), Vachel Lindsay (1935), Walt Whitman (1937), and Mark Twain (1938). His autobiography, Across Spoon River, was published in 1936.

Agnes Lee (married Otto Freer in 1911) was a published Chicago poet apparently admired by Masters, for he wrote in his autobiography: "Such excellent and gifted women as Harriet Monroe, Eunice Tietjens, Agnes Freer, though for many years I have seen little of them, still go in their orbits with something of a sustaining magnetism in my life... ."