Chicago literature is writing, primarily by writers born or living in Chicago, that reflects the culture of the city.
Chicago literature is writing, primarily by writers born or living in Chicago, that reflects the culture of the city.
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 like Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, and Edna 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 critic H. 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]
While Chicago produced much realist and naturalist fiction, [9] 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 it was the first to publish James Joyce's novel Ulysses, in serial form until the magazine was forced to discontinue the novel due to obscenity charges. [10] Similarly, the publication that became Poetry magazine (founded 1912 by Harriet Monroe) was instrumental in launching the Imagist and Objectivist poetic movements. [11] T. S. Eliot's first professionally published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," appeared in Poetry. Contributors have included Ezra Pound, W. B. 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. [12] 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. [13]
Chicago's universities also have a strong reputation for developing literary talent. In the second half of the 20th century, the University of Chicago served as a hub for many emerging postmodern writers such as Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, and Robert Coover. Bellow received his Bachelor's from nearby Northwestern University, which has also produced acclaimed authors such as George R.R. Martin, Tina Rosenberg and Kate Walbert.
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 and José Olivarez. [14]
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." [16]
The Encyclopedia of Chicago identifies three periods of works from Chicago which had a major influence on American Literature: [17]
Literature scholar Robert Bone argues for the existence of an overlapping fourth period:
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:
Alternative versions of Chicago sometimes appear in fantasy and science fiction novels.
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.
Saul Bellow was a Canadian–American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
The Western canon is the body of high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly valued in the West, works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and such works are also valued throughout the globe. It is "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature".
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser 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 moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1871.
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.
Margaret Walker was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include For My People (1942) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an American artist, writer, and journalist who contributed to Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, which chronicled cultural advancements during the Harlem Renaissance. Though often overlooked, she herself made considerable accomplishments in art, poetry, and prose. She is perhaps best known for her short story "Wedding Day", which was published in the magazine Fire!! and explores how gender, race, and class dynamics shape an interracial relationship. Bennett was a dedicated and self-preserving woman, respectfully known for being a strong influencer of African-American women rights during the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout her dedication and perseverance, Bennett raised the bar when it came to women's literature and education. One of her contributions to the Harlem Renaissance was her literary acclaimed short novel Poets Evening; it helped the understanding within the African-American communities, resulting in many African Americans coming to terms with identifying and accepting themselves.
Bruce Meyer is a Canadian poet, broadcaster, and educator. He has authored more than 64 books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, and literary journalism. He is a professor of Writing and Communications at Georgian College in Barrie and a Visiting Associate at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where he has taught Poetry, Non-Fiction, and Comparative Literature.
Haki R. Madhubuti is an African-American author, educator, and poet, as well as a publisher and operator of black-themed bookstore. He is particularly recognized in connection with the founding in 1967 of Third World Press, considered the oldest independent black publishing house in the United States.
Urban fiction, also known as street lit or street fiction, is a literary genre set in a city landscape; however, the genre is as much defined by the socio-economic realities and culture of its characters as the urban setting. The tone for urban fiction is usually dark, focusing on the underside of city living. Profanity, sex, and violence are usually explicit, with the writer not shying away from or watering-down the material. Most authors of this genre draw upon their past experiences to depict their storylines.
Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, essayist, critic, educator, curator, and arts administrator. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography in 1995 for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program in New York City, he was President of the Poetry Foundation from 2013–2015, before returning to the New School as a professor of writing.
Floyd James Dell 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 of the first third of the 20th Century." In Chicago, he was editor of the nationally syndicated Friday Literary Review. As editor and critic, Dell's influence is seen in the work of many major American writers from the first half of the 20th century. A lifelong poet, he was also a best-selling author, as well as a playwright whose hit Broadway comedy, Little Accident (1928), was made into a Hollywood movie.
Frank Marshall Davis was an American journalist, poet, political and labor movement activist, and businessman.
English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon invaders in the fifth century, are called Old English. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English, and has achieved national epic status in England, despite being set in Scandinavia. However, following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. The English spoken after the Normans came is known as Middle English. This form of English lasted until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a London-based form of English, became widespread. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, was a significant figure in the development of the legitimacy of vernacular Middle English at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were still French and Latin. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 also helped to standardise the language, as did the King James Bible (1611), and the Great Vowel Shift.
Ramón Arroyo was an American playwright, poet and scholar of Puerto Rican descent who wrote numerous books and received many literary awards. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo in Ohio. His work deals extensively with issues of immigration, Latino culture, and homosexuality. Arroyo was openly gay and frequently wrote self-reflexive, autobiographical texts. He was the long-term partner of the American poet Glenn Sheldon.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku is an American poet, novelist, screenwriter, and journalist, whose writing often focuses on culture and travel in the African diaspora. She has been the recipient of several awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the American Antiquarian Society. Her novels include The River Where Blood is Born (1997), which won the American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Best Fiction, and Hot Johnny , which was an Essence magazine bestseller in hardcover fiction. She has also taught literature and creative writing at educational institutions internationally, including at Columbia College Chicago, the University of Miami, Nova Southeastern University, the Writer's Studio at the University of Chicago, the North Country Institute for Writers of Color, the Hurston-Wright Writers Workshop, and Chicago State University.
The Imaginary Library: An Essay on Literature and Society is a 1982 book by American literary critic and professor Alvin Kernan. In the book, Kernan considers literature as a social institution and considers ways in which the reigning Romantic conception of literature, which has dominated Western culture for 200 years, has fallen into decline due to changes in society.
