Mitch Miller by Edgar Lee Masters.

Edgar Lee Masters should be remembered for lots more than Spoon River Anthology. Mitch Miller is a self-conscious 1920 modern-lit take on Hamlet and Tom Sawyer. The book’s hero had read both Twain and Shakespeare, and regularly compares his own adventures to theirs. He even has similar troubles with his parents and gets caught up in a murder mystery and courtroom case.
Sounds like a ripping boy’s adventure yarn, or perhaps a Dickensian potboiler. But all Masters’ work, from his poetry to his plays to his novels to his biographies of Abraham Lincoln (another figure frequently referenced in Mitch Miller), Walt Whitman and Twain, is imbued with strong political and social themes. Masters practiced law with Clarence Darrow. He defended the underclass and decried the insensitivity of governments. His books allow the downtrodden to complain. In Spoon River, he even allows ghosts to bitch and moan from the afterlife.

In this edition of Mitch Miller, Edgar Lee Masters’ concerns for the most vulnerable members of society are underscored by his choice of illustrator the novel: John Sloan, the celebrated “Ashcan artist” who brought social realism to American art museums. During the decade before Mitch Miller was published in 1920, Sloan had been the art editor of The Masses, the set designer for the The Paterson Strike Pageant, and a participant in the famed 1913 Armory Show.

Mitch Miller is written in a first-person vernacular, narrated by the titular Mitch’s pal Skeet. Mitch likens himself to Hamlet, and deems Skeet his Horatio. The Shakespeare allegories in the book are fascinating; it’s like that scene in The Wire where a chess game is compared to selling drugs on the streets of Baltimore.

It’s also got this observation, as filtered through Skeet:
About this time I was about a third through readin’ the Bible to earn that five dollars that grandma had promised me. And Mitch asked me what I though, and I said I didn’t understand it much; but in parts it was as wonderful as any book. And Mitch says, “Do you know what the Bible is?” “No, I says; “what is it?” “Why,” he says, “the Bible is the ‘Tom Sawyer’ of grown folks. I know that now; so I don’t have to go through the trouble of findin’ it out after I’m grown up and depended upon it for a long while. There’s the sky and the earth, and there are folks, and we’re more or less real to each other, and there’s something back of it. But I believe when you die, you’re asleep—sound asleep—I almost know it. And why we should wake up a bit and then go to sleep forever is more than my pa knows or any person in the world knows.”
Mitch scared me with his talk. He was so earnest and solemn and seemed so sure.