Masters retired to the Chelsea Hotel to write a series of biographies as well as an autobiography covering his boyhood years and his career up to 1917. Emphasizing life on his grandfather's farm, his school days, his political battles, the workday world, and the growth of a poet's mind through wide reading, the book is a valuable record of Masters's work habits and offers considerable insight on his position as a critic and his place in American literature. Retired and not in the best health, Masters moved with his wife to her teaching positions in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Throughout the 1940s he received several literary awards, including the Poetry Society of America medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He died in Melrose, Pennsylvania and is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois.
Masters is a transitional figure in American literary history.
The Spoon River poems are distinctly modern, leading one to forget that he composed poems on the deaths of Whitman and Browning. He was comfortable with nineteenth-century long narrative poems but also contributed much to the development of the modern idiom. For over four decades he celebrated the prairie landscapes, the people of Illinois, and the values of his midwestern heritage. He has been underrated as a critic and commentator on American culture, particularly in the tradition of Whitman as against the more dominant Wasteland and imagist schools. Much of his literary career reflects the marginalization of midwestern opinion and influence in light of eastern establishment power and control.