American Voices of the Chicago Renaissance (review)

The attempt to reproduce spoken language is a hallmark of the Chicago Renaissance. While accepting this common premise, Lisa Woolley’s analysis also challenges it by asking, Whose speech? Defining early twentieth-century Chicago literature by its “crudity, simplicity, and vitality” may fit celebrations of the city as “Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,” but it does not acknowledge the new status of women and limits the city’s range of multiethnic voices. Woolley’s book broadens the traditional definition by considering “journalists’ experiments with dialect, the speaking tours of Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, the oratory of reformers Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells, the conversational manner in which Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson ran their magazines, and the emerging vernacular aesthetic in African American literature [specifically, the works of Fenton Johnson and Marita Bonner].”

The range of literary activity that Woolley covers is impressive, but unfortunately, the diversity is never successfully connected to form a clearly focused argument. Added to the mix are references to contemporary ideas and theories that are not developed in ways that harness their explanatory power. For example, Woolley pairs Lindsey’s walking tours and performances with Sandburg’s The American Songbag to compare their notions of cultural literacy with those of E. D. Hirsh Jr., but she does not draw a clear conclusion from this comparison. Instead, the reader gains scattered insights on the poets’ primitivism, the limitations of dialect writing, and the question of racism in representing the voices of groups not one’s own. All of this increases our understanding of these poets in specific ways, but the tenuousness of the connections among ideas may leave readers more frustrated than enlightened.

Woolley’s focus on relatively unknown authors will be of interest to specialists, and her comparison of Harriet Monroe’s editorship of Poetry and Margaret Anderson’s of the Little Review offers an engaging view of their differences. The chapter on Fenton Johnson and Marita Bonner, along with earlier references to Richard Wright, links the first Chicago Renaissance to the second one that immediately follows, with African American literature at its center. Woolley bridges the two with a consideration of language use in the Harlem Renaissance.

One wishes that the insights of this book had crystalized into a clearer picture of a literature often claimed to be quintessentially American.