Chicago is a great literary city. I say this not only as a matter of fact, but also as a matter of assertion.
A few years ago, I found myself in an impromptu conversation with the owner of Ravenswood Used Books about the author Nelson Algren while looking for a copy of The Man with the Golden Arm and Never Come Morning. She explained that it was nearly impossible to keep Algren on the shelves in Chicago, while whenever she traveled to New York she couldn’t find anyone who knew about him or his work.
Algren—who won the 1950 National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm—undoubtedly created one of the most definitive portraits of Chicago during that era through his fiction and book-length essay Chicago: City on the Make, which traced the pulse of the city to its seedy bars, darkened alleys, and smoke-filled back rooms where gangsters and corrupt politicians alike did their work. While the essay would go on to inspire other chroniclers of the city like Studs Terkel, it was already working within an established tradition. In fact, Algren dedicated the book to Carl Sandburg, as he took significant inspiration from his 1916 poem “Chicago.”
Sandburg described his seminal poem as “a chant of defiance by Chicago…defiance of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, London, Paris, Berlin and Rome.” As he explained, “the poem sort of says ‘Maybe we ain’t got culture, but we’re eating regular.”
One of my favorite aspects of art is the way in which it intertwines and shapes history. While perception is not reality, our understanding of the past is in part molded by the ways in which artists depict it. We need to know our history, of course, but stories are how we make sense of ourselves, our cultures, and our homes.
What is the story of Chicago? Maybe someone would point first to machine politics and gangsters, corruption sunk into the bone. Ask the media or the worst people you know and they’d probably tell a story of rampant violence and fear. But I also wonder how many people would have no real answer at all; the third city behind New York and its American mythos of new opportunity and Los Angeles and the relentless pursuit for fame amid the glitz and glamor of Hollywood. Throughout the years, these stories have been endlessly deconstructed and subverted, yet they stick tightly into the narrative fabric of these places.
To put it in grand terms, I’d argue that the story of Chicago is one of audacity and intimacy. It’s a city forged by a Great Lake and Great Fire, with people who raised their home eight feet higher out of the muck and rebuilt from the ground up in the wake of disaster. Though we haven’t always lived up to the promise, the story of Chicago is that there is no problem that cannot be solved, and time and again the impossible became reality here. But despite the grandness (both in ambition and growth), Chicago remains a city you can know by the inch—every street, back porch, corner store, and alleyway. You can find yourself in its neighborhoods just as easily as you can get lost. A city of individuals with a culture of collectivism.
It’s a beautiful story, as is the art that it’s spawned. Since the city’s founding, Chicago has enjoyed at least three literary renaissances. In Chicago’s early years, authors like Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carry), Henry Blake Fuller (The Cliff-Dwellers), and Hamlin Garland (Rose of Dutcher’s Cooly) established the first template of the “Chicago novel.” Then in the 1910s and ‘20s, the city’s literary community played an outsized role in establishing the modernist movement as figures like Harriet Monroe (founding publisher of Poetry Magazine), Margaret C. Anderson (founder of The Little Review), and Carl Sandburg (Chicago Poems) overturned the conventions of the East Coast to create something unique to Chicago. Then, in the 1930s and ‘40s, the Chicago Black Renaissance in Bronzeville and the South Side saw iconic authors such as Gwendolyn Brooks (A Street in Bronzeville), Richard Wright (Native Son), Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), and Margaret Walker (For My People) created a new, socially conscious aesthetics through their intimate and unsparing depictions of life in the city. Through their words, we came to understand Chicago both as a window into American life and a city so daring and bold as to be entirely unique.
These authors and the movements they inspired crafted the image of Chicago that we see today, a portrait of balance between extremes. Roughness and intimacy. Individual pursuit and community. Struggle and promise.
That is our story that we own. A story no one can take from us.
In 2018, the Chicago Review of Books staff and representatives from Unabridged Bookstore and the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library co-authored an article that argued that Chicago is undergoing a new literary renaissance. Detailing the flourishing of poetry, fiction, and historical writing, they noted that “thanks to these writers (and many more), Chicago is once again becoming the kind of cultural epicenter that once led H. L. Mencken to call it ‘the literary capital of the United States.’”
The essay doesn’t go into detail about what spurred this new Chicago literary renaissance or its defining traits, but I’d like to pose a few thoughts. First, modern Chicago is a city of performance and spoken word, with many writers honing their craft on the stage through organizations and open mics like Young Chicago Authors (where artists like Chance the Rapper, Eve L. Ewing, Nate Marshall, and Jamila Woods got their start), Uptown Poetry Slam, 2nd Story, the Sunday Reading Series and the Sunday Salon Chicago, and many more. In turn, we see a lot of art that lives both on the page and the world, that is meant to be read and performed aloud. Our writers also enjoy a deeply intricate and intertwined network of support, including the city’s fantastic library system, MFA programs, independent bookstores, and literary organizations like StoryStudio Chicago, Chicago Writers Association, Poetry Foundation, Lit & Luz Festival, and more. The days of needing to leave for New York to build a career are over. Aspiring and established writers alike can read, learn, publish, and grow right here in a community that supports and celebrates its artists.
And what about the art itself? While style and substance ranges across books, the authors of this literary renaissance continue the tradition of intimacy and clear-eyed portraits of the city. Like Gwendolyn Brooks first taught us, these writers understand that oftentimes the best looks of Chicago are the ones from their own front porches or street corners, as this city and the lives that it holds differ vastly from block to block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and El stop to El stop. That intimacy often leads to childlike wonder—a perspective best captured by contemporaries to Brooks like Sandra Cisneros (House on Mango Street) and Stuart Dybek (Coast of Chicago)—but it is never clouded by nostalgia or free from introspection. Instead, these authors are unsparing in their critique of their homes because they understand their promise and beauty.
From its humble origins on bright stages, workshop roundtables, and back corners of bookstores to the flourishing of unforgettable art we see today, something special has been happening here in Chicago for some time now. The question is, how do we honor and canonize it?
In honor of the 10th anniversary of the Chicago Review of Books, we’re excited to launch The New Chicago Renaissance, a special year-long feature series that will revisit exemplary works of literature about Chicago from the last 10 years and explore their continued literary and cultural relevance. We invited 12 leading writers and artists including Rebecca Makkai, Sandra Cisneros, Nathan Hill, Jamila Woods, and more to pick a book that they love and write about why it’s meaningful to them and our understanding of modern Chicago.
We plan to publish one of these essays every month from now through the end of 2026. Together, we hope to build a more full picture of some of the incredible works of art Chicago writers have created during this most recent literary renaissance and how they tell the story of who we are and where we’re going. Literary renaissances don’t stand the test of time without effort. Instead, works of literature linger in our imagination because it is reread, written about, and preserved. We hope to begin to tell the story of what’s happening here in Chicago.
Because what’s happening here is special.
