Chicago Literature

The Encyclopedia of Chicago is a masterful piece of scholarship which presents a comprehensive and sometimes dizzying compendium of seemingly every aspect of Chicago's history. This massive tome--1,117 oversized pages and weighing in at nearly five pounds--was expertly edited by James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating and Janice L. Reiff, and developed by The Newberry Library with the cooperation of The Chicago Historical Society.

The book is utterly fascinating. I've found myself bouncing from section to section--from "Icelanders" to "Haymarket and May Day" to "Film"--with no apparent rhyme or reason to my wandering. I might be tempted to toss of the standard book-jacket blurb "I couldn't put it down!" were it not for the fact that, due to its sheer mass, it sometimes becomes a physical imperative to put it down occasionally. But given Chicago's rich history, a book of anything less than this size would fail to do the subject justice.

While I would highly recommend it to any Chicagoan or Chicagophile out there, the Encyclopedia has several sections of interest to fans of Chicago literature.

Northwestern University lecturer Bill Savage presents a fine overview of the history of Chicago fiction. After briefly touching on the earliest attempts at Chicago fiction--including quasi-fictional historical narratives, dime novels and man-on-the-street journalism from the likes of Finley Peter Dunne and George Ade--Savage perfectly encapsulates the unique physical and social characteristics of the city which ultimately shaped the Chicago school of fiction:

But when discussing Chicago and fiction, most of the focus belongs on serious attempts in prose narrative--novels and short stories--to capture the essence of the city, its spaces and its people. As Carl S. Smith has demonstrated, this project was from the beginning fraught with both aesthetic and ideological challenges, as the booming Chicago of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seemed to belong to some new world, a world not particularly amenable to the rules of narrative prose fiction as then practiced. Neither high-flown romance nor genteel realism could grasp a place grown from a frontier outpost to world city in the course of two generations. Chicago has challenged fiction writers to contemplate new industrial methods and urban spaces like the skyscraper; observe violent conflict between capital and labor; think about the moral drama of immigration from the Midwestern hinterland, the far reaches of Europe, and the world; and face the irreducible conflict between an urban culture centered on making money and traditional values placed on high art, civic service and family virtue.

Savage goes on to discuss several of the giants of Chicago fiction--Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow. A fascinating essay.

Several other fiction-based sections appear throughout the Encyclopedia, including the "Chicago Literary Renaissance" of the early 20th Century (Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, Ring Lardner); "Literary Careers"; "Literary Cultures"; and, most vividly, "Literary Images of Chicago."

In this last section, Boston College's Carlo Rotella expertly presents three differing physical descriptions of the city, that of Dreiser (from Sister Carrie), Gwendolyn Brooks (from the poem "Of De Witt Williams on His Way to Lincoln Cemetary") and Stuart Dybek (from the story "Blight"). In conclusion, Rotella writes:

The images offered by Dreiser, Brooks and Dybek were chosen for their literary significance and representativeness, but also because rail lines run through all of them. Chicago's literature, like the city itself, took shape around railroads; trains run through its cities of feeling, carrying loads of meaning, just as trains still carry goods and flesh-and-blood passengers through the city of fact. Those connecting trains suggest a web of literary influences and linkages extending back from the present well into the nineteenth century; they also suggest a distinctive engagement with the city of fact that binds Chicago's literature to what Nelson Algren called "the thousand-girded El" and all the hard realities it represents.

Other literary-related sections of the Encyclopedia--or at least those that I've discovered so far; it will take most of this year for me just to skim its entirety--are devoted to poetry, playwriting, journalism and publishing.