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Chicago literature is writing, primarily by writers born or living in
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
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, that reflects the culture of the city.
Themes and movements
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." 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. Chicago's dynamic growth, as well as the manufacturing, economics, and politics that fueled this growth, can be seen in the works of writers like
Carl Sandburg
Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg ...
,
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (; August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm mora ...
,
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and ...
,
Hamlin Garland
Hannibal Hamlin Garland (September 14, 1860 – March 4, 1940) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, Georgist, and psychical researcher. He is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers.
Biogra ...
,
Frank Norris
Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr. (March 5, 1870 – October 25, 1902) was an American journalist and novelist during the Progressive Era, whose fiction was predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include '' McTeague: A Story of San ...
,
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in sever ...
,
Willa Cather
Willa Sibert Cather (; born Wilella Sibert Cather; December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including '' O Pioneers!'', '' The Song of the Lark'', and '' My Ántonia''. In 192 ...
, and
Edna Ferber
Edna Ferber (August 15, 1885 – April 16, 1968) was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning '' So Big'' (1924), ''Show Boat'' (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical), '' Ci ...
.
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. Chicagoans worked hard to create a literary tradition that would stand the test of time, and create a "city of feeling" out of concrete, steel, vast lake, and open prairie. Among the new techniques and styles embraced by Chicago writers were "
naturalism," "
imagism
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is someti ...
," and "
free verse
Free verse is an open form of poetry, which in its modern form arose through the French '' vers libre'' form. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.
Defi ...
."
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 critic
H.L. Mencken wrote in a London magazine, the ''
Nation
A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society. A nation is thus the collective Identity (social science), identity of a group of people unde ...
,'' that Chicago was the "Literary Capital of the United States."
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."
![Poetry cover1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Poetry_cover1.jpg)
While Chicago produced much
realist and naturalist fiction, its literary institutions also played a crucial role in promoting international
modernism
Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
. The avant-garde ''
Little Review'' (founded 1914 by
Margaret Anderson) began in Chicago, though it later moved elsewhere. The ''Little Review'' provided an important platform for experimental literature, famously it was the first to publish
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
's novel ''
Ulysses,'' in serial form until the magazine was forced to discontinue the novel due to obscenity charges. Similarly, the publication that became ''
Poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
'' magazine (founded 1912 by
Harriet Monroe) was instrumental in launching the
Imagist
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is someti ...
and
Objectivist poetic movements.
T. S. Eliot's first professionally published poem, "
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910, and it was first publishe ...
," appeared in ''Poetry''. Contributors have included
Ezra Pound,
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...
,
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism.
In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pedia ...
,
Langston Hughes and
Carl Sandburg
Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg ...
, among others. The magazine also discovered such poets as
Gwendolyn Brooks,
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for ''Divine Comedies.'' His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyri ...
, and
John Ashbery.
[Goodyear, Dana]
"The Moneyed Muse: What can two hundred million dollars do for poetry?"
article, ''The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
'', February 19 and February 26 double issue, 2007 ''Poetry'' and the ''Little 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.
Chicago's universities also have a strong reputation for developing literary talent. In the second half of the 20th century, the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
served as a hub for many emerging
postmodern writers such as
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only w ...
,
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and ...
,
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short story writer.
Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophicall ...
, and
Robert Coover
Robert Lowell Coover (born February 4, 1932) is an American novelist, short story writer, and T.B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.
Background
...
. Bellow received his Bachelor's from nearby
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
Charte ...
, which has also produced acclaimed authors such as
George R.R. Martin
George Raymond Richard Martin (born George Raymond Martin; September 20, 1948), also known as GRRM, is an American novelist, screenwriter, television producer and short story writer. He is the author of the series of epic fantasy novels '' A So ...
,
Tina Rosenberg
Tina Rosenberg (born April 14, 1960) is an American journalist and the author of three books. For one of them, '' The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism'' (1995), she won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the Nati ...
and
Kate Walbert
Kate Walbert (born August 13, 1961) is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in New York City. Her novel, ''Our Kind'', was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. Her novel ''A Short History of Women'', a ''New York Ti ...
.
Today, Chicago is home to the world's largest youth poetry festival,
Louder Than a Bomb
Rooted & Radical Youth Poetry Festival (formerly named Louder Than a Bomb) is an annual youth poetry slam in Chicago every spring. Founded in 2001 by Kevin Coval and Anna West of the nonprofit organization Young Chicago Authors. It is now the la ...
. 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 and José Olivarez.
According to Bill Savage in ''The 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."
Periodization
''The Encyclopedia of Chicago'' identifies three periods of works from Chicago which had a major influence on
American Literature:
*A period around the turn of the 20th century, which featured "Midland
realism
Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to:
In the arts
*Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts
Arts movements related to realism include:
*Classical Realism
*Literary realism, a move ...
" of authors such as
Henry Blake Fuller
Henry Blake Fuller (January 9, 1857 – July 28, 1929) was an American novelist and short story writer. He was born and worked in Chicago, Illinois. He is perhaps the earliest novelist from Chicago to gain a national reputation. His exploration ...
,
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (; August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm mora ...
and
Eugene Field
Eugene Field Sr. (September 2, 1850 – November 4, 1895) was an American writer, best known for his children's poetry and humorous essays. He was known as the "poet of childhood".
Early life and education
Field was born in St. Louis, Missour ...
;
*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 as
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and ...
,
Floyd Dell
Floyd James Dell (June 28, 1887 – July 23, 1969) was an American newspaper and magazine editor, literary critic, novelist, playwright, and poet. Dell has been called "one of the most flamboyant, versatile and influential American Men of Letters ...
,
Carl Sandburg
Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg ...
,
Harriet Monroe, and
Margaret Anderson;
*A period in the 1940s featuring what it calls "neighborhood novels." Authors in this period include
James T. Farrell
James Thomas Farrell (February 27, 1904 – August 22, 1979) was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet.
He is most remembered for the ''Studs Lonigan'' trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and a television series in 1979.
B ...
,
Richard Wright,
Gwendolyn Brooks and
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only w ...
.
Literature scholar
Robert Bone
Robert Adamson Bone (1924 – November 25, 2007). was a scholar of African-American literature and a professor of English at Columbia University.
Biography
Bone was a conscientious objector during World War II. He received a B.A. in English from ...
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 earlier
Harlem Renaissance. Bone's list of Chicago Renaissance writers includes fiction writers like Richard Wright,
William Attaway
William Alexander Attaway (November 19, 1911 – June 17, 1986) was an African-American novelist, short story writer, essayist, songwriter, playwright, and screenwriter.
Biography
Early life
Attaway was born on November 19, 1911, in Greenvil ...
, and
Willard Motley along with poets like
Frank Marshall Davis
Frank Marshall Davis (December 31, 1905 – July 26, 1987) was an American journalist, poet, political and labor movement activist, and businessman.
Davis began his career writing for African American newspapers in Chicago. He moved to Atlant ...
and
Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker (Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander by marriage; July 7, 1915 – November 30, 1998) was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. H ...
. It is worth noting that the term "
Chicago Black Renaissance
The Chicago Black Renaissance (also known as the Black Chicago Renaissance) was a creative movement that blossomed out of the Chicago Black Belt on the city's South Side and spanned the 1930s and 1940s before a transformation in art and cultur ...
" is often used to denote creativity in all the arts, not just in literature, during the 1930s-50s.
Works about Chicago or set in Chicago
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:
Fiction, drama, and poetry
*
Nelson Algren
Nelson Algren (born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham; March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer. His 1949 novel ''The Man with the Golden Arm'' won the National Book Award and was adapted as the 1955 film of the same name.
Algren articulated ...
's ''
Chicago: City on the Make'' (1951) is a prose poem about the alleys and the El tracks, the neon and the dive bars, the beauty and cruelty of Chicago.
*
David Auburn's play ''
Proof'' (2000 New York debut) is set on the porch of a house in
Hyde Park. The play focuses on the emotional turmoil experienced by Catherine, a young woman who recently lost her father, a prominent
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
mathematician who suffered from an unspecified mental illness.
*
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only w ...
's ''
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 of
Humboldt Park, cavorting with heiresses on
Chicago's Gold Coast, studying at the University of Chicago, fleeing union thugs in the
Loop, and taking the odd detour to hang out with Trotsky in
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
while eagle-hunting giant iguanas on horseback. Novelist
Martin 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."
*
Gwendolyn Brooks's ''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 1940s
Bronzeville.
*
Frank London Brown's powerful debut novel, "Trumbull Park" (1959) fictionalizes the real-life ordeals of the first black families to integrate
South 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
Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel, ''The House on Mango Street'' (1983), and her subsequent short story collection, '' Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories'' (1991). Her work e ...
's ''
The House on Mango Street'' (1983) is a Mexican-American
coming-of-age novel
In literary criticism, a ''Bildungsroman'' (, plural ''Bildungsromane'', ) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood ( coming of age), in which character change is imp ...
, 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.
*
Theodore Dreiser's ''
Sister 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 the ''Dictionary of Literary Biography,'' Dreiser was an important figure in American naturalism.
*
Stuart Dybek
Stuart Dybek (born April 10, 1942) is an American writer of fiction and poetry.
Biography
Dybek, a second-generation Polish American, was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods in the 1950s ...
's ''The 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 as
Pilsen and
Little Village populated by Eastern European and Latino immigrant communities.
*
Eve Ewing
Eve Louise Ewing (born 1986) is an American sociologist, author, poet, and visual artist from Chicago, Illinois. Ewing is a tenured professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Her academic research in ...
's poetry collection ''1919'' (2019), a follow-up to her 2017 volume ''Electric Arches,'' uses poetry to depict the
Chicago race riot of 1919
The Chicago race riot of 1919 was a violent racial conflict between white Americans and black Americans that began on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, on July 27 and ended on August 3, 1919. During the riot, 38 people died (23 black and ...
and grapple with its legacy a century after the
Red Summer of 1919
Red Summer was a period in mid-1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots occurred in more than three dozen cities across the United States, and in one rural county in Arkansas. The term "Red Summer" was coined by civil ...
.
*
James T. Farrell
James Thomas Farrell (February 27, 1904 – August 22, 1979) was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet.
He is most remembered for the ''Studs Lonigan'' trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and a television series in 1979.
B ...
's
''Studs 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 like
Prohibition
Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage (whether in barrels or in bottles), transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcohol ...
and the
Great Depression.
*
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play ''A Raisin in the Sun'', highli ...
's play ''
Raisin in the Sun
''A Raisin in the Sun'' is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The title comes from the poem "Harlem" (also known as "A Dream Deferred") by Langston Hughes. The story tells of a black family's experiences in south Chic ...
'' (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. The play echoes a real event: in 1938, Hansberry's father challenged the
restrictive covenant that enforced racial segregation in Chicago's
Washington Park Subdivision
The Washington Park Subdivision is the name of the historic 3- city block by 4-city block subdivision in the northwest corner of the Woodlawn community area, on the South Side of Chicago in Illinois that stands in the place of the original ...
.
*
Audrey Niffenegger's science fiction love story ''
The Time Traveler's Wife
''The Time Traveler's Wife'' is the debut novel by American author Audrey Niffenegger, published in 2003. It is a love story about Henry, a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably, and about Clare, his wife, an ...
'' (2003) takes place largely in North Side Chicago settings, including the
Newberry Library.
*
Frank Norris
Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr. (March 5, 1870 – October 25, 1902) was an American journalist and novelist during the Progressive Era, whose fiction was predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include '' McTeague: A Story of San ...
's ''
The Pit'' (1903) is a naturalistic novel about greed and speculation at the early 20th-century
Chicago Board of Trade. It is the second installment in ''The 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.
*
Carl Sandburg
Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg ...
's ''
Chicago 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.
*
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in sever ...
's ''
The Jungle
''The Jungle'' is a 1906 novel by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair's primary purpose in describing the meat industry and its working conditions was to advance socialism in the United States. However, most readers we ...
'' (1906) belongs to the canons of both Chicago literature and US labor history for its muckraking depiction of the desolation experienced by Lithuanian immigrants working in the
Union Stock Yards
The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards, was the meatpacking district in Chicago for more than a century, starting in 1865. The district was operated by a group of railroad companies that acquired marshland and turned it into a central ...
on
Chicago's Southwest Side.
*
Richard Wright's ''
Native Son
''Native Son'' (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s.
While not apologizing f ...
'' (1940), set in Depression-era
Bronzeville and
Hyde Park, is about a doomed, young, black man warped by the racism and poverty that define his surroundings.
Nonfiction
*
Karen Abbott's ''Sin 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.
*
Jane Addams
Laura Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 May 21, 1935) was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, and author. She was an important leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage ...
' ''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.
*
Erik Larson's ''Devil in the White City'' (2003) is a best-selling popular history about the
1893 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's ''Perfect Cities: Chicago's Utopias of 1893''.
*
Mike Royko's ''Boss'' (1971), written by a ''Chicago Daily News'' columnist, is a biography of the powerful mayor
Richard J. Daley
Richard Joseph Daley (May 15, 1902 – December 20, 1976) was an American politician who served as the Mayor of Chicago from 1955 and the chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party Central Committee from 1953 until his death. He has been cal ...
. The book provides a critical look at Daley's rise to power and at Chicago's political culture of "clout." ''American Pharaoh'' (Cohen and Taylor) is a scholarly treatment of the same subject.
*
Studs Terkel's ''Working'' (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.
[Austen, Jake.]
Building Stories vs. Working: Greatest Chicago Book Tournament, round one
" ''Chicago Reader'' 29 Dec 2014.
Alternate realities
Alternative versions of Chicago sometimes appear in fantasy and science fiction novels.
*
Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher (born October 26, 1971) is an American author., He has written the contemporary fantasy ''The Dresden Files'', ''Codex Alera'', and '' Cinder Spires'' book series.
Personal life
Butcher was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1971. H ...
's ''
The Dresden Files
''The Dresden Files'' is a series of contemporary fantasy/ mystery novels written by American author Jim Butcher. The first novel, '' Storm Front''—which was also Butcher's writing debut—was published in 2000 by Roc Books.
The books are wr ...
'' (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.
*
Veronica Roth
Veronica Anne Roth (born August 19, 1988) is an American novelist and short story writer, known for her bestselling ''Divergent'' trilogy which has sold more than 35 million copies worldwide.
Personal life
Veronica Roth was born on August 19, ...
's
''Divergent'' trilogy (2011–13) is a young-adult series set in a dystopian future Chicago.
Other
Other noted writers, who were from Chicago or who spent a significant amount of their careers in Chicago include,
David Mamet
David Alan Mamet (; born November 30, 1947) is an American playwright, filmmaker, and author. He won a Pulitzer Prize and received Tony nominations for his plays ''Glengarry Glen Ross'' (1984) and '' Speed-the-Plow'' (1988). He first gained cri ...
,
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century f ...
,
Ben Hecht,
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos (; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist, most notable for his ''U.S.A.'' trilogy.
Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a young man, visit ...
,
Edgar Rice Burroughs,
Edgar Lee Masters
Edgar Lee Masters (August 23, 1868 – March 5, 1950) was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of ''Spoon River Anthology'', ''The New Star Chamber and Other Essays'', ''Songs and Satires'', ''The Great V ...
,
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and ...
,
Eugene Field
Eugene Field Sr. (September 2, 1850 – November 4, 1895) was an American writer, best known for his children's poetry and humorous essays. He was known as the "poet of childhood".
Early life and education
Field was born in St. Louis, Missour ...
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Hamlin Garland
Hannibal Hamlin Garland (September 14, 1860 – March 4, 1940) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, Georgist, and psychical researcher. He is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers.
Biogra ...
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See also
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American Writers Museum
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Culture of Chicago
The culture of Chicago, Illinois is known for the invention or significant advancement of several performing arts, including improvisational comedy, house music, industrial music, blues, hip hop, gospel, jazz, and soul.
The city is known for i ...
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List of fiction set in Chicago
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Printers Row Lit Fest
Notes
Furthur reading
*Duffey, Bernard, ''The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters,''
Greenwood Press, Westport CT (1972)
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* Moore, Michelle E., ''Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict'', Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York (2019)
External links
Chicago Literary Hall of Fame
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chicago Literature
Chicago in fiction
Literature by topic