The Chicago of Fiction (review)

At least since the New Historicist revolution of the early 1980s, and the accompanying challenges to the literary canon, scholars and teachers have sought to teach and research a wider range of literature, trying to see around the filters of history to identify works which have passed out of favor but which nevertheless offer fascinating insights into their historical context. While scholars have long used resources like The Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, newspaper archives, and library catalogs, these resources posed several problems, including lacunae around reviews of popular fiction, lack of annotations in catalogues, and the sheer difficulty of culling works together along regional lines. Toward this end, resources like The Chicago of Fiction, by James A. Kaser, are invaluable. As its title suggests, Kaser’s work assembles a comprehensive account of novels and short story collections either “wholly or mostly set in Chicago” or in which Chicago has a “strong symbolic role throughout the book.” Kaser has masterfully indexed and annotated a wide range of works, from pulp authors, to juvenile authors, to lesser lights of the Chicago Renaissance such as Nelson Algren, to well-known authors with only one or two works set in the city, such as Philip Roth (Letting Go, 1962) or Langston Hughes (Not Without Laughter, 1930). Chicago, of course, occupies a tremendous place in American literature, serving as a “second city” that helped displace the Northeast, and New England in particular, as the exclusive site of American literary production, and serving as an incubator for everyone from Sherwood Anderson to Frank Norris to T. S. Eliot to Nella Larsen, to say nothing of those writers whose works are nearly synonymous with Chicago, such as Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and Saul Bellow.

In reading The Chicago of Fiction, one is struck by the multiple Chicagos that emerge here: the world of upper class socialites, working class steelworkers, recently arrived immigrants, African Americans during the Great Migration, Yippies around the 1968 Democratic Convention, and so on. There are countless novels that follow the pattern of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, detailing the difficulties and triumphs of adapting to city life. There are a series of novels set in Chicago department stores (such as Albert Halper’s The Little People, 1942) and at least one set in O’Hare International Airport (Arthur Hailey’s Airport, 1968). The juxtapositions here are often striking: Isaac Rosenfeld’s 1947 novel about Orthodox Jews on the North Side, Passage from Home, appears immediately after Richard Rose’s 1979 political thriller The Satyr Candidate. Plenty of obscure works by minority writers appear here, as with the African American writers Scott Nearing (Free Born, 1932), Rose Robinson (Exile in the Air, 1969), Waters Edward Turpin (O Canaan! 1939), and Melvin Van Peebles (The True American: A Folk Fable, 1976).

The volume’s most useful facet is the annotated bibliography of works published between 1852 and 1980. Here, Kaser summarizes each work, often with an eye toward its relevant cultural context, calling attention to its depiction of labor issues, or women in the workplace, or immigrants, or gender roles, or even the rise of interstate trucking, as in this annotation to Milton Ozaki’s Dressed to Kill (1954): “The criminal activity in the novel is interesting for revealing the dominance of interstate trucking in the transportation of goods by the 1950s since all of the fenced items come from stolen trucks,” or Margaret Shane’s The Unpaid Piper (1927) on the Chicago real estate boom of the 1920s: “the march of high rise buildings up the lakefront have a significant impact on Lakeshore as houses close to the lake get torn down or relocated.” Annotations should be useful to scholars and teachers interested in researching particular topics, or developing clusters of works around, say, gender roles in Chicago in the 1910s. Those entries which mention specific locations are most useful, as with the one for Newton Fuessle’s Gold Shod—a bohemian district on the South Side, the red-light...