Edgar Lee Masters wrote the Spoon River Anthology more than one hundred years ago - a collection of short poems that collectively narrated the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town. The aim of the poems was to demystify the rural, small town American life, and this broadcast offers a view of the townspeople of Spoon River as Edgar Lee Masters saw them. They speak from a burial ground above the village, and what they say is often at variance with what is engraved upon their tombstones, and at variance too with their fellow townsmen's opinions of them. For even in the stillness of death, they are disturbingly human - none so good or so bad as he may have seemed whilst alive. The story begins with Robert Fulton Tanner...