April 25, 2025— Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters

The next meeting of Great Books KC will be April 25, 2025. 

We will discuss Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. 

Meeting Date & Time:
• Date: April 25, 2025 
• Time: 7:00 pm

Hybrid Zoom & In-Person Meeting:
• In-person meeting, Little Conference Room, Plaza Branch Library
• Zoom link sent to mailing list on day of meeting
• Request mailing list addition, send to GreatBooksKC@gmail.com

About the Book:

Spoon River Anthology (1915) is a collection of short free verse poems by Edgar Lee Masters. The poems collectively narrate the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the Spoon River, which ran near Masters's home town of Lewistown, Illinois. The aim of the poems is to demystify rural and small town American life. The collection includes 212 separate characters, in all providing 244 accounts of their lives, losses, and manners of death. Many of the poems contain cross-references that create a candid tapestry of the community. The poems originally were published in 1914 in the St. Louis, Missouri, literary journal Reedy's Mirror, under the pseudonym Webster Ford.

March 28, 2025—The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty

The next meeting of Great Books KC will be March 28, 2025. 

We will discuss The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty. 

Meeting Date & Time:

• Date: March 28, 2025 

• Time: 7:00 pm

Hybrid Zoom & In-Person Meeting:

• In-person meeting, Little Conference Room, Plaza Branch Library

• Zoom link sent to mailing list on day of meeting
• Request mailing list addition, send to GreatBooksKC@gmail.com

About the Book:
The Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning short novel by Eudora Welty. It was first published as a long story in The New Yorker in March 1969 and was subsequently revised and published in book form in 1972. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva. Her father's second wife, Fay, who is younger than Laurel, is a shrewish outsider from Texas. Her shrill response to the Judge's illness appears to accelerate his demise. Laurel and Fay are thrown together when they return the Judge's body to his hometown, Mount Salus, Mississippi, where he will be buried. There, Laurel is immersed in the good neighborliness of the friends and family she knew before marrying and moving away to Chicago. Fay, though, has always been unwelcome and leaves for a long weekend, leaving Laurel in the big house full of memories. Laurel encounters her mother's memory, her father's life after he lost his first wife, and the complex emotions surrounding her loss as well as the many memories. She comes to a place of understanding that Fay can never share, and she leaves small town Mississippi with the memories she can carry with her.