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  • Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson
  • John E. Hallwas
Liesl Olson, Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 373 pp. $35.

This is a distinctive and sometimes insightful account of some literary figures associated with Chicago, from the early twentieth century through the 1940s. Among the strengths of Liesl Olson's book are her commentaries on journalist Fanny Butcher and innovative literary stylist Gertrude Stein—neither of whom have been discussed much in relationship to the Chicago literary scene—and her insights into "the Chicago Black Renaissance" (as she calls it), extending from the late 1920s into the 1940s. However, the focus of her book is also problematic in some ways. It does not, for example, reflect much appreciation for certain key figures of the Chicago Renaissance. Also, it does not discuss many significant literary works that appeared during those eras.

In a sense, awareness of some of the studies that have preceded Olson's book is helpful for comprehending what makes her Chicago Renaissance both distinctive and problematic. Bernard Duffey's The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters (1954), for example, discusses the fast-growing metropolis as a "creative center" that attracted fiction writers like Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, Floyd Dell, and Sherwood Anderson, as [End Page 163] well as three notable poets: Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay. Central to the midwestern literary flowering they produced was the thrust for "realism" and the quest for "liberation" (from cultural and artistic restraint). Dale Kramer's Chicago Renaissance: The Literary Life in the Midwest 1900–1930 (1966) emphasizes many of the same figures in that era, but it also traces the roots of the literary flowering that marked Chicago a century ago in Theodore Dreiser's fiction and in the work of two influential magazine editors, Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson. So, novelists, poets, and editors created what would eventually be called "the Chicago Literary Renaissance," which reached its crest during the World War I era. That is still regarded as the great city's initial literary flowering, which brought national attention to some distinctive (especially realistic and naturalistic) midwestern voices for the first time.

However, more recent studies go beyond that period and those figures. Scholar Lisa Woolley, in American Voices of the Chicago Renaissance (2000) focuses on two renaissance periods in Chicago: the 1890–1920 era of realism, early naturalism, and new poetry, and a 1930–1950 flowering of African American literature. That broader chronological (and ethnic) focus is also reflected in Mary Hricko's The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell (2009).

Olson follows the broader approach, in that she discusses two renaissance movements—producing, as she says, "a book that would connect Chicago's early literary renaissance from the 1890s through the 1920s to the period of African American cultural ferment … in the late 1920s through the Second World War." And she asserts the connection between those developments by saying, "Driven by a desire to represent the everyday plight of the working classes, many writers in Bronzeville sustained a tradition in Chicago established by Henry Blake Fuller, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, James T. Farrell, and other writers who worked to represent the larger social and economic forces that shaped the individual condition."

But one underlying problem is connecting the earlier renaissance with the later one. Were all those literary figures, then, part of the same extended "Chicago Renaissance," as her book title suggests? Or did Chicago have, in fact, two noted literary flowerings, the second of which focused only on the black experience—as she also asserts? And if the second renaissance, or flowering of notable literature, was centered in the 1930s and 1940s, what about James T. Farrell, a significant literary naturalist who was also deeply focused on Chicago during that same era—and was not black? Olson [End Page 164] mentions him (as in the quote above) but does not discuss him. Omitting a superb writer because of a race-based focus is not likely to make Chicago's second renaissance more notable or...

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