Chicago

Alfred Kazin

“For the literature of the American people one went to Chicago writers….”

The Chicagoan on Chicago, in an issue from 1927:

“It’s a crescent-shaped town, 26 miles by 15, along a great lake that’s begun to weaken and recede. No wonder: An unchallenged murder record — a splendid university — hobo capital to the country — railroad ruler, corn baron, liquor king — and the finest of grand opera. Altogether the most zestful spectacle on this sphere.”

Adam Langer, quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times (April 24, 2005):

"I love the idea of being considered a ‘Chicago writer,’ but what I like about the category is that it almost sounds like something out of a different era, like owning a Studebaker or having played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

GREAT CHICAGO WRITERS AND THEIR GREAT CHICAGO WORKS

Saul Bellow, from an interview by Rockwell Gray, Harry White, and Gerald Nemanic, Triquarterly, 60 (1984).

“Chicago is one of the large provinces of my psychic life. I refer, of course, to the old Chicago, which is now in full decay.”

Saul Bellow, from Herzog (1964) (National Book Award)

“He drove directly to Woodlawn Avenue—a dreary part of Hyde Park, but characteristic, his Chicago: massive, clumsy, amorphous, smelling of mud and decay, dog turds; sooty façades, slabs of structural nothing, senselessly ornamented triple porches with huge cement urns for flowers that contained only rotting cigarette butts and other stained filth; sun parlors under tiled gables, rank areaways, gray backstairs, seamed and ruptured concrete from which sprang grass; ponderous four-by-four fences that sheltered growing weeds. And among these spacious, comfortable, dowdy apartments where liberal, benevolent people lived (this was the university neighborhood) Herzog did in fact feel at home.”

[AS: add something about Herzog’s hilarious letters]

Gene and Georgetti's

Saul Bellow, from Humboldt’s Gift (1975) (Pulitzer Prize)

“I sat up and saw the river flashing night-lights on the right, and the Merchandise Mart decorated for Christmas. We were going to Gene and Georgetti’s old steakhouse, just off the spur of the Elevated train. Parking among other sinister luxury cars we went into the drab old building where—hurrah for opulent intimacy!—a crash of jukebox music fell on us like Pacific surf. The high-executive bar was crowded with executive drinkers and their lovely companions. The gorgeous mirror was peopled with bottles and resembled a group photograph of celestial graduates.”

More Chicago books by Saul Bellow

Adventures of Augie March (1954) (National Book Award)

The Actual (1997)

Ravelstein (2000)

Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. The presentation speech noted his “rare vigor and stringency” and his backgrounds of “carefully observed and depicted settings, whether it is the magnificent facades of Manhattan in front of the backyards of the slums and semi-slums, [or] Chicago's impenetrable jungle of resourceful businessmen intimately intertwined with obliging criminal gangs…”

Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren, from Chicago: City on the Make (1951)

“An October sort of city even in Spring. With somebody’s washing always whipping, in smoky October colors off the third-floor rear by that same wind that drives the yellowing comic strips down all the gutters that lead away from home. A hoarse-voiced extry-hawking newsie of a city.”

This little book, 92-pages long, seems to defy any particular genre but is often described as a stream-of-consciousness prose poem; Studs Terkel called it “a split-hearted love song.”

More by Nelson Algren

Never Come Morning (1942)

The Neon Wilderness (1947) (18 stories)

The Man with the Golden Arm (1949; winner of the first National Book Award)

Algren’s novels and stories were mostly set in TK. From 1959 to 1975 (according to a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly), Algren lived on Evergreen Street. The apartment he shared earlier with Simone de Beauvoir, at 1523 W. Wabansia Avenue, is mentioned in her letters to him (from 1947 to 1964) collected in Transatlantic Love Affair (1999).

Sources:

“United States of Chicago,” by Aleksandar Hemon, The New York Times, January 17, 2009.