When City of Discontent  was first published, it bore the subtitle "An interpretive biography of Vachel Lindsay, being also the story of Springfield, Illinois, USA, and of the love of the poet for that city, that state, and that nation."  But the book is, like Carl Sandburg's Lincoln, not so much a biography as a poetic interpretation of the life of one of the state's leading poets of the first half of the twentieth century.