Chicago literature

State Street around the turn of the 20th century, the period of one of the major waves of Chicago literature.

Chicago literature is writing, primarily by writers born or living in Chicago, that reflects the culture of the city.

Themes and Movements

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. Thus, 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.

In 1920, the critic H.L. Mencken wrote in a London magazine, the Nation, that Chicago was the "Literary Capital of the United States." Chicago's early twentieth-century writers and publishers were seen as producing new work that broke with the Victorian and Eastern United States establishment past and embraced new techniques and styles including "naturalism," "imagism," and "free verse." Themes often centered on an exciting but dirty urbanism, as well as the quaint but dark and sometimes stultifying small town. Chicago's dynamic growth, as well as the manufacturing, economics, and politics that fueled this growth, could be seen in the works of writers like Sandburg, Dreiser, Anderson, Garland, Norris, Sinclair, Cather, and Ferber.

While Chicago produced much realist and naturalist fiction, its literary institutions also played a crucial role in promoting international modernism. 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 serializing James Joyce's novel Ulysses until the magazine was forced to discontinue the novel due to obscenity charges. Similarly, the publication that became Poetry Magazine (founded 1912 by Harriet Monroe) was instrumental in launching the Imagist and Objectivist poetic movements. T. S. Eliot's first professionally published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," appeared in Poetry. Contributors have included Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg, among others. The magazine also discovered such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, and John Ashbery. 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.

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" of authors such as Henry Blake Fuller, Theodore Dreiser and Eugene Field;
• 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, Floyd Dell, Carl 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, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks and Saul Bellow.

Literature scholar Robert Bone argues for the existence of a 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, and Willard Motley along with poets like Frank Marshall Davis and Margaret Walker. It is worth noting that the term "Chicago Black Renaissance" 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 and Poetry

• Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make is a prose poem about the alleys, the El tracks, the neon and the dive bars, the beauty and cruelty of Chicago.
• Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March 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 while eagle-hunting giant iguanas on horseback. Novelist Martin Amis described the book as "An epic about the so-called ordinary," a remark that indicates the text's sprawling, episodic structure. Amis also went so far as to claim that "The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel."
• Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville is the collection of poems that launched the career of the famous Chicago poet, focusing on the aspirations, disappointments, and daily life of those who lived in 1940s Bronzeville.
• Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street is a Mexican-American coming-of-age novel, dealing with a young Latina girl, Esperanza Cordero, growing up in the Chicago Chicano ghetto. It commonly appears in American high school reading lists.
• Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, published in 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's The Coast of Chicago, 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.
• James T. Farrell's most famous novels, including Studs Lonigan, focused on the often bitter lives of Chicago's Irish-Americans around the time of the Great Depression.
• John Guzlowski's Lightning and Ashes consists of poems chronicling the author's experiences growing up in the immigrant and displaced persons' neighborhoods in Chicago's old Polish Downtown, in the context of Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish Cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians.
• Lorraine Hansberry's play Raisin in the Sun tells of 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 had challenged the restrictive covenant that enforced racial segregation in Chicago's Washington Park Subdivision.
• Audrey Niffenegger's The Time-Traveler's Wife is a recent love story set in Chicago nightclubs, museums, and libraries.
• Frank Norris's The Pit is a novel of greed and life on the early 20th century trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade.
• Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems 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's The Jungle sits among the canon of both Chicago literature and US labor history for its muckraking-style depiction of the desolation experienced by Lithuanian immigrants working in the Union Stockyards on Chicago's Southwest Side.
• Richard Wright's Native Son, set in Depression-era Bronzeville and Hyde Park, is about a doomed, young, black man warped by the racism and poverty that defined his surroundings.

Nonfiction

• Karen Abbott's Sin in the Second City is about Chicago's vice district, the Levee, and some of the personalities involved: gangsters, corrupt politicians, and two sisters who ran the most elite brothel in town.
• Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House, 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 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, written by a Chicago Daily News columnist, is a biography of the powerful mayor Richard J. Daley. 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 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.

Alternate Realities

Alternative versions of Chicago sometimes appear in fantasy and science fiction novels.

• Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files 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's Divergent trilogy is a young-adult series set in a dystopian future Chicago.

Other noted writers, who were from Chicago or who spent a significant amount of their careers in Chicago include, David Mamet, Ernest Hemingway, Ben Hecht, John Dos Passos, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene Field, and Hamlin Garland.

See also

• Culture of Chicago
• List of fiction set in Chicago

References

• Duffey, Bernard, The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters, Greenwood Press, Westport CT (1972)

Resources

Chicago Literary Hall of Fame