James Atlas, in his biography of Chicago writer Saul Bellow, suggests that "the city's reputation for nurturing literary and intellectual talent can be traced to the same geographical centrality that made it a great industrial power."[1] When Chicago was incorporated in 1837, it was a frontier outpost with about 4,000 people. The population rose rapidly to approximately 100,000 in 1860. By 1890, the city had over 1 million people.[2] Chicago's dynamic growth, as well as the manufacturing, economics, and politics that fueled this growth, can be seen in the works of writers likeCarl Sandburg,Theodore Dreiser,Sherwood Anderson,Hamlin Garland,Frank Norris,Upton Sinclair,Willa Cather, andEdna Ferber.[3]
Due to these rapid changes, Chicago writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced the challenge of how to depict this potentially disorienting new urban reality. Narrative fiction of that time, much of it in the style of "high-flown romance" and "genteel realism", needed a new approach to describe Chicago's social, political, and economic conditions.[4] Chicagoans worked hard to create a literary tradition that would stand the test of time,[5] and create a "city of feeling" out of concrete, steel, vast lake, and open prairie.[6] Among the new techniques and styles embraced by Chicago writers were "naturalism", "imagism", and "free verse".[3] Themes often centered on an exciting but dirty urbanism, as well as the quaint but dark and sometimes stultifying small town.
Chicago's early twentieth-century writers and publishers were seen as producing innovative work that broke with the literary traditions of Europe and the Eastern United States. In 1920, the criticH. L. Mencken wrote in a London magazine,TheNation, that Chicago was the "Literary Capital of the United States".[7] Expressing the attitude that Chicago writers were creating a distinctive, new, and far from genteel literary idiom, he wrote, "Find a writer who is indubitably an American in every pulse-beat, snort, and adenoid, an American who has something new and peculiarly American to say and who says it in an unmistakable American way, and nine times out of ten you will find that he has some sort of connection with the gargantuan and inordinate abattoir by Lake Michigan."[8]
The first issue of Chicago-basedPoetry magazine appeared in 1912.
While Chicago produced muchrealist and naturalist fiction,[9] its literary institutions also played a crucial role in promoting internationalmodernism. The avant-gardeLittle Review (founded 1914 byMargaret Anderson) began in Chicago, though it later moved elsewhere. TheLittle Review provided an important platform for experimental literature, famously it was the first to publishJames Joyce's novelUlysses, in serial form until the magazine was forced to discontinue the novel due to obscenity charges.[10] Similarly, the publication that becamePoetry magazine (founded 1912 byHarriet Monroe) was instrumental in launching theImagist andObjectivist poetic movements.[11]T. S. Eliot's first professionally published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", appeared inPoetry. Contributors have includedEzra Pound,W. B. Yeats,William Carlos Williams,Langston Hughes andCarl Sandburg, among others. The magazine also discovered such poets asGwendolyn Brooks,James Merrill, andJohn Ashbery.[12]Poetry and theLittle Review were "daring" in their editorial championship of the modernist movement. Later editors also made substantial contributions in poetry, as did Chicago's university and performance venues.[13]
Today, Chicago is home to the world's largest youth poetry festival,Louder Than a Bomb.[14][15] Since its founding in 2001, Louder Than a Bomb has grown into a multi-week celebration that includes competitions, workshops, and other poetry-related events. By 2018, the festival was drawing over 100 teams for a total of more than 1000 young poets competing in spoken word tournaments. The festival is credited with influencing contemporary Chicago poets like Nate Marshall andJosé Olivarez.[14]
According to Bill Savage inThe Encyclopedia of Chicago, today's Chicago writers are still interested in the same social themes and urban landscapes that compelled earlier Chicago writers: "the fundamental dilemmas presented by city life in general and by the specifics of Chicago's urban spaces, history, and relentless change."[16]
A period in the 1910s and 1920s in which literary works were published by newspapers and new literary magazines based in Chicago. Sometimes called the "Chicago Renaissance" which includes the later works of Dreiser and the work of authors such asSherwood Anderson,Floyd Dell,Carl Sandburg,Harriet Monroe, andMargaret Anderson;
Literature scholarRobert Bone argues for the existence of an overlapping fourth period:
A second "Chicago Renaissance", this time lasting approximately 1935 to 1950 and referring to a wave of creativity from Chicago's African American writers. Bone suggests that this Chicago Renaissance was comparable in influence and importance to the earlierHarlem Renaissance. Bone's list of Chicago Renaissance writers includes fiction writers like Richard Wright,William Attaway, andWillard Motley along with poets likeFrank Marshall Davis andMargaret Walker.[18] The term "Chicago Black Renaissance" is often used to denote creativity in all the arts, not just in literature, during the 1930s–1950s.[19]
Much notable Chicago writing focuses on the city itself, with social criticism keeping exultation in check. Here is a selection of Chicago's most famous works about itself:
David Auburn's playProof (2000 New York debut) is set on the porch of a house inHyde Park. The play focuses on the emotional turmoil experienced by Catherine, a young woman who recently lost her father, a prominentUniversity of Chicago mathematician who suffered from an unspecified mental illness.[21]
Saul Bellow'sThe Adventures of Augie March (1953) charts the long, drifting life of a Jewish Chicagoan and his myriad eccentric acquaintances throughout the early 20th century: growing up in the then Eastern European neighborhood ofHumboldt Park, cavorting with heiresses onChicago's Gold Coast, studying at the University of Chicago, fleeing union thugs in theLoop, and taking the odd detour to hang out with Trotsky inMexico while eagle-hunting giant iguanas on horseback. NovelistMartin Amis describes the book as "An epic about the so-called ordinary", a remark that indicates the text's sprawling, episodic structure. Amis also goes so far as to claim that "The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel."[22]
Gwendolyn Brooks'A Street in Bronzeville (1945) is the collection of poems that launched the career of the famous Chicago poet, focusing on the aspirations, disappointments, and daily life of African-Americans living in 1940sBronzeville.[23]
Frank London Brown's powerful debut novel,Trumbull Park (1959) fictionalizes the real-life ordeals of the first black families to integrateSouth Side Chicago's Trumbull Park public housing project in the 1950s. First published 1959. Henry Regnery Company, Chicago. Re-published 2004, 2005 by Northeastern University Press (Northeastern Library of Black Literature).
Sandra Cisneros'sThe House on Mango Street (1983) is a Mexican-Americancoming-of-age novel, dealing with a young Latina girl, Esperanza Cordero, growing up in a neighborhood modeled on Chicago's Humboldt Park. It commonly appears in American high school reading lists.[24]
Theodore Dreiser'sSister Carrie (1900) tells the tale of a country girl who leaves home to seek her fortune, first in Chicago and later in New York. Its descriptions of Chicago include a portrait of Loop department stores at the end of the nineteenth century. According to theDictionary of Literary Biography, Dreiser was an important figure in American naturalism.[25]
Stuart Dybek'sThe Coast of Chicago (2004), written in a style blending the gritty with the dreamlike, is a collection of fourteen short stories about growing up in Chicago, largely in neighborhoods such asPilsen andLittle Village populated by Eastern European and Latino immigrant communities.[26]
James T. Farrell'sStuds Lonigan: A Trilogy (1935) focuses on the often bitter lives of Chicago's South Side Irish-Americans during the 1920s and 30s, tying their fates to larger cultural narratives like the American Dream and to historical events likeProhibition and theGreat Depression.[28]
Lorraine Hansberry's playA Raisin in the Sun (1959 Broadway debut) depicts the struggles faced by a working-class family of black Chicagoans who attempt to purchase a home in a segregated white neighborhood.[29] The play echoes a real event: in 1938, Hansberry's father challenged therestrictive covenant that enforced racial segregation in Chicago'sWashington Park Subdivision.[30]
Frank Norris'sThe Pit (1903) is a naturalistic novel about greed and speculation at the early 20th-centuryChicago Board of Trade. It is the second installment inThe Epic of Wheat, a never-finished trilogy in which Norris planned to depict the economic life cycle of this crucial commodity from production to consumption.[33]
Carl Sandburg'sChicago Poems (1916) depicts scenes from early-twentieth-century Chicago, often focusing on working-class characters and commenting on the class divide. With this early volume, Sandburg established his reputation as the poet of the common American.[34]
Karen Abbott'sSin in the Second City (2007) provides a history of Chicago's vice district, the Levee, and some of the early twentieth-century personalities involved: gangsters, corrupt politicians, crusading reformers, and two sisters who ran the most elite brothel in town.[37]
Jane Addams'Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), written by a social reformer who won the 1931 Nobel Peace prize, is an autobiography combined with firsthand investigation of poverty, immigrant communities, and political activism in turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago.[38]
Erik Larson'sDevil in the White City (2003) is a best-selling popular history about the1893 Colombian Exposition; it's also about the serial killer who was stalking the city at the same time. Straight history of the Exposition and also the workers' paradise in Pullman is found in James Gilbert'sPerfect Cities: Chicago's Utopias of 1893.
Mike Royko'sBoss (1971), written by aChicago Daily News columnist, is a biography of the powerful mayorRichard J. Daley. The book provides a critical look at Daley's rise to power and at Chicago's political culture of "clout".[39]American Pharaoh (Cohen and Taylor) is a scholarly treatment of the same subject.
Studs Terkel'sWorking (1974) is a series of interviews with American workers. Although Terkel interviewed people in other cities, most of his material comes from Chicago, and the book uses interviews to paint a composite portrait of Chicago as a laboring town.[40]
Alternative versions of Chicago sometimes appear in fantasy and science fiction novels.
Rena Barron'sMaya and the Rising Dark (2020) is the start of a middle-grade fantasy series set in contemporary Chicago.
Jim Butcher'sThe Dresden Files (begun 2000) is a series set in Chicago about Harry Dresden, Chicago's first (and only) Wizard PI, who protects the city from supernatural attack.
^Atlas, James.Bellow. New York: Random House, 2000. 6.
^Nugent, Walter.Encyclopedia of Chicago, "Demography."
^abPinkerton, Jan; Hudson, Randolph H. (2004). "Introduction".Library of American Literature. Vol. Encyclopedia of the Chicago Literary Renaissance. New York:Facts on File, Inc. pp. 1–426,iv–v.ISBN0-8160-4898-3.
^Pinkerton, Jan; Hudson, Randolph H. (2004). "Introduction".Library of American Literature. Vol. Encyclopedia of the Chicago Literary Renaissance. New York:Facts on File, Inc. pp. 1–426, iv.ISBN0-8160-4898-3.
^Diedrick, James.Encyclopedia of Chicago, "The Jungle."
^Church, Ellen and Kimberly Mertz. "Richard WrightArchived 2015-04-22 at theWayback Machine."Teaching African American Literature: Resources for High School Teachers in Southeastern North Carolina. University of North Carolina-Pembroke, 2009. Retrieved 11 April 2015.
Moore, Michelle E.,Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict, Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York (2019)
