Charlotte Jones 

Chicago: reading the midwestern metropolis of American literature

From the socially tough novels of naturalism, to intellectually demanding modernism, this city provides a thrilling challenge to the reader
  
  

Chicago from Sears Tower
Literary overview … Chicago seen from the Sears Tower, where visitors can survey the city from the 99th-floor Skydeck. Photograph: Bruno Ehrs/ Bruno Ehrs/Corbis Photograph: Bruno Ehrs/ Bruno Ehrs/Corbis

In 1920 the literary critic and satirist HL Mencken wrote in the Nation that Chicago is the "Literary Capital of the United States". Given the city's relative provinciality, marooned way out in the Midwest, it is perhaps a surprising claim. And yet this is a city that can lay claim to being the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway and Philip K Dick; the alma mater of Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut, who both studied at its university after the second world war; and during the 1920s, the unexpected cultural centre of European modernism. So how to narrow down a reading list from an ever expanding range of possibilities?

Chicago didn't really hit the big time until the late 19th century, when it became the bustling metropolis of an increasingly industrialised Midwest, and its economy – based on pork, beef, and bicycles – quickly aligned itself with a gritty literary consciousness; dubbed "Midland Realism". Authors such as Henry Blake Fuller practised a form of grubby urbanism whose inspiration was clearly the fin de siècle naturalism of Émile Zola. But where Zola's interest lies in the city as consumerist illusion and commercial spectacle, Midland Realism is comprehensively industrial, taking as its core narrative the futility of working class (typically immigrant) ambition eternally thwarted by a corrupt, white capitalist system.

Theodore Dreiser, whose rags to riches and back again tale of a country girl moving to the big city, Sister Carrie (first published 1900, but suppressed until 1912), is probably the pièce de resistance. He took as his subject the American Dream and women, drily noting that, "when a girl leaves her home at 18, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse". Caroline Meeber, needless to say, succumbs to the latter, and after a series of affairs which shocked readers, flees to Canada with her lover. Read this before a night at the theatre, the scene of Carrie's most shocking seduction…

An even more extreme example of Midland Realism is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), a novel that set out to expose what Sinclair called the "the inferno of exploitation" raging in turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago (and certainly not a book to be read within a mile of a steakhouse). The story follows Jurgis, a Lithuanian immigrant who finds work in one of the meatpacking plants near the Union Stock Yards, but is fired after an injury and tumbles into poverty and despair. The Jungle has its flaws: the characters are typified and there's little psychological awareness, but Sinclair reserves his real insight for the dire socio-economic realities of working class life: iniquitous mortgage schemes; job insecurity; the lack of social welfare; the systematic role of alcohol as a means of oppression, driving frozen workers into warm gin bars; and, curiously for a work commissioned as socialist propaganda, the ambiguous impact of trade unions upon the lives of the workers. It also has the rare acclaim of actually having made a difference: Roosevelt may have called Sinclair a hysterical 'crackpot', but the book led directly to the first regulation of the meat industry in 1904. (Sinclair sardonically retorted that "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach".)

It's probably not a location to visit, but the stockyards are embedded in the Chicago consciousness and crucial to understanding the city, and reading a tribute to them wouldn't be out of place atop the Chicago Skydeck looking out across the urban landscape: Carl Sandburg's poem Chicago declares the inhabitants "proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation". (For anybody wanting a challenge, they also feature in the first chapter of Thomas Pynchon's epic Against the Day.) The hard-boiled legacy of Midland Realism is also firmly in evidence in the manner if not the location of the works of Raymond Chandler, another venerable Chicago birthee.

So what about that outrageous claim I made earlier about Chicago as the centre of European modernism? By the 1920s, when Mencken made his assertion, the city was well into the "Chicago Renaissance", a flourishing of literary endeavour spanning roughly 1912 to 1925. Head down to the Billy Goat Tavern, historical (and current) epicentre of Chicago's journalism, and see what I mean. In addition to housing the Dial, the city produced two of the great modernist literary editors, Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson, without whom much of the literature might not have seen the light of day. Monroe founded Poetry magazine in 1912, publishing TS Eliot's Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock alongside Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes. Poetry was a crucial vehicle for both Imagism and Objectivism, and later discovered a young John Ashbery. Anderson's the Little Review was, if anything, even more radical. In many ways the magazine itself was inseparable from the early surrealist art that it published; the bold typeface and brash colours signalled its modus operandi: "Making No Compromise with the Public Taste". It's a little quirky as a holiday read, admittedly, but all editions are available for free at the Modernist Journals Project and are well worth downloading. Take along The Little Review's most famous issue – September 1916 – where the editors left most of it blank to protest the lack of acceptable material!

After the modernist epoch, the Chicago keynote of grit remained. An African-American movement thrived up until the 1950s, paralleling the better known Harlem Renaissance of same time, but with a markedly different tone from the latter's fixation in the "roaring twenties". True to form, the emphasis in writers such as Richard Wright, whose Native Son was published in 1940, was more social inequality, economic deprivation, and a specifically racialised vision of the failure of the American Dream for those migrating north to escape racism. Upgrading Sinclair's vision, Wright aptly noted that Chicago literature "is a struggle over the nature of reality" and that "men can starve from a lack of self-realisation as much as they can from a lack of bread".

Perhaps the Chicago epic, though, is Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, a mid-20th century bildungsroman which follows the life of Augie, an American Everyman, pursuing the American dream:

"I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles."

This is a powerful act of self-definition to open the novel, and testament to the constant tension between individual self-determination and the power of fate which drives not just Chicago but all of the US.

 

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