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.

Lewistown is a city and the county seat of Fulton County, Illinois, United States. It was named by its founder, Ossian M. Ross, after his oldest son, Lewis W. Ross. The population was 2,041 at the 2020 census. Located in central Illinois, it is southwest of Peoria. It is the source of Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, who lived there. Native American burial mounds are nearby at Dickson Mounds off Illinois Route 97.