10 Chicago Writers

As a Mexican American child growing up in Chicago, Sandra Cisneros experienced a childhood that would later prove to be an inspiring theme for her adult writings. She learned the hardships Mexican Americans faced as they lived in a mostly alien culture and covered them in her publications, such as the poetry volume Bad Boys (1980) and her most famous fictional work The House on Mango Street (1983), which demonstrated some of her experiences as an adolescent desiring to be a writer in an inimical setting. With the success of this novel and her later writings, Cisneros was able to travel and teach throughout the United States at levels ranging from the second grade to college, including stints at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She became an internationally renowned author, with her books being translated into more than 20 languages and published throughout the world.

It can be said of this poet that she was as important to Chicago as Chicago was to her. Born in Kansas, Brooks’s family moved to Chicago when she was rather young, thus giving her nearly an entire lifetime to let the influences of the city seep into her writing. After graduating from Wilson Junior College in 1936, Brooks submitted several poems to the Chicago Defender, which then published them, awarding the nascent poet limited, though helpful recognition. After years of work, she published her first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), in which she uplifted her ordinary neighbors and their struggles into extraordinary tales. With her next collection, Annie Allen (1949), Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, becoming the first African American to win the much-coveted literary prize. Throughout the rest of her life, she remained a citizen of Chicago and continued to author countless volumes of poetry as well as a children’s book and an autobiography. Her ability to bridge to gap between literary intellectuals and contentious black civil rights activists proved a major skill of hers and led to her becoming the Library of Congress consultant in poetry and the first poet laureate of Illinois. She continued to give back to the city that provided so much material for her by holding a position as an English professor at Chicago State University until her death.

“A man of convictions and contradictions” is an appropriate summary of this Chicago writer. Floyd Dell, born to an impoverished family in central Illinois, cast schooling aside at the early age of 16 to work in a factory. Already composing poetry at that time, he waited until 1908 (when he was about 21) to move to Chicago to become a newspaperman. There he excelled and soon became an eminent leader of Chicago’s literary movement, as he advanced the careers of such acclaimed writers as Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. His career as a novelist, critic, journalist, and biographer bookended WWI, during which he was simultaneously embraced and shunned for his support of conscientious objectors to the newly implemented draft. He was thus indicted for treason by the U.S. government. However, as time passed and his reputation grew, he became a government employee in the Federal Writers Project, which was a post he held until he retired. Among his copious writings are the novels Moon-Calf (1920) and its sequel, The Briary-Bush (1921); the nonfictional works, such as a biography (1927) of The Jungle (1906) author Upton Sinclair and Love in the Machine Age (1930), in which he expressed his views of the status of sex, love, marriage, and family in a changing America; and his writings for such left-wing newspapers as The Masses and The Liberator.

Born into a wealthy family of the Chicago elite (having an ancestor who is credited with installing the first water pipe system in the city), Henry Blake Fuller floated through the upper-class with an eye of contempt, which he used often in his prose to highlight the social ills suffered by the lower classes at the hands of business tycoons and politicians. Though he had distaste for his peers, he took advantage of the opportunities that his birth offered by attending the city’s finest schools, during which time he chronicled his thoughts and early attempts at poetry in a journal. After studying abroad for a year, he tried his hand at fiction with The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani (1890; written under the pseudonym Stanton Page), a leisurely told novel about Europe, but he failed to earn great praise until he published serially The Cliff-Dwellers (1893), which served as a realistic telling of members of a Chicago merchant family trying to keep in step with the city’s elite. His cold and cynical yet still loving attitude toward Chicago led critics to deem that novel the first important American city novel. He continued on in that vein, authoring a slew of other books as well as academic journal entries about the city, all the while traveling back and forth from Chicago to Italy. Though he received very little attention in the 20th century, critics believe it to be a result of his failure to have formed a tightly knit literary circle during his time instead of a lack of talent.

Although some may falsely assume this author’s homeland to be somewhere in the heart of the African jungle, the imaginative creator of the enduring Tarzan character was born in none other than the heart of the Midwest—Chicago, Illinois. Born into a wealthy family, Edgar Rice Burroughs attended several prestigious schools across the country, starting in Chicago and ending in a military academy in Michigan (with an expulsion from an Andover, Massachusetts, private school somewhere in between). After leaving Michigan Military Academy, where he taught for a short time, he settled in Chicago to write copy for an advertising company before turning his attention full-time to fiction. Earning immediate acclaim with his story “Under the Moons of Mars,” published serially in The All-Story in 1912, Burroughs realized his talent and embarked upon a literary journey that would land him a place in pop-culture history. The first Tarzan story surfaced in 1912 and was succeeded by more than 20 others. The descendent of English nobility raised by apes became a hit with readers, as Tarzan fell in love with the beautiful Jane from Baltimore and traveled to fabled societies such as the lost city of Atlantis, the City of Gold, and a land in the center of the Earth where it is always day.

Our next Chicago novelist has earned high praise for his legal thrillers, most notably for Presumed Innocent (1987), its sequel Innocent (2010), and Identical (2013). In addition to being known for such spellbinding publications, Scott Turow has distinguished himself as an academic and a reputable lawyer. Born in Chicago, Turow excelled throughout high school and moved on to receive a higher education from and to teach at prominent universities such as Stanford and Harvard Law School, the latter fostering his legal knowledge so he could go on to graduate with honors. Once equipped with an abounding education, Turow returned to his home city and served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the late 1970s and mid-’80s, after which he was appointed to several public bodies (in addition to writing fiction and nonfiction, of course). Among his celebrated nonfiction is One L (1977), which recounts his time as a law student, and Ultimate Punishment (2003), in which he contemplates the ramifications of the death penalty.

Very few facts are known about the private life of this illustrious and prolific poet, illustrator, and even songwriter. One thing that we can know for certain, however, is that the beloved children’s poet was born in Chicago at the start of the 1930s. Though he is best-known for his collections of poems and illustrations for children, such as Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974), A Light in the Attic (1981), and Falling Up (1991)—which are also loved by adults for their comical and yet tragic themes—Shel Silverstein started his career in the military publication Stars & Stripes as well as in the adult magazine Playboy. From there he graduated to the collections of poems that he is now famous for. A final piece of possibly handy trivia about this Chicago poet is that, in addition to his poetry collections, Silverstein also authored several songs, perhaps best-known of which being “A Boy Named Sue,” first performed by Johnny Cash in 1969.

This jack-of-all-trades and momentary rail-rider who is most famously associated with Chicago for his so-titled poem hailed from central Illinois, where he was born second of seven children in a small three-room cottage. However, the eminent Carl Sandburg did not get lost in the mix of such a large family. Early in life, he left his home and drifted through the Midwest, working a litany of odd jobs such as being a porter, driving a truck, working in a brickyard, and harvesting crops. It was these experiences that cemented Sandburg’s sympathies for lower-class workers and that influenced his Whitman-like poetry. It wasn’t until 1913 that he moved to the “City of the Big Shoulders,” where he edited the business magazine System and later covered labor issues for the Chicago Daily News. His collective experiences in Chicago and roaming through the Midwest funneled into his authoring his most famous poem, “Chicago,” (published 1914) in which he articulates the frustrations and yet the pride of the city’s inhabitants and institutions. It was this poem, along with his entire collection titled Chicago Poems (1916), that kick-started his literary career and sewed his name forever into Chicago’s history and soul.

Though not born in Chicago, it can be argued that Sherwood Anderson owes a great deal of his success to the Windy City and its literary renaissance that spanned over the first quarter of the 20th century. He found outlets for his experimental prose and short fiction in such famed Chicago publications as The Little Review, The Masses, Seven Arts, and Poetry. And it was with those publications, along with his collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919), that he broke away from the chains of traditional short fiction and ushered in a new era of simply short and raw descriptions of characters’ psychological isolations and frustrations. These went on to influence the work of such well-known authors as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

There are few, if any, more recognizable names in American literature than that of Ernest Hemingway. Although he is more often associated with expatriate members of Paris’s 1920s Modernist circle—such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound—he began writing at an early age in high school in a Chicago suburb known as Oak Park. It was there that he experienced his childhood and teenage years that influenced a plethora of his renowned short stories, which revolved around themes of masculinity and the affirmation of courage. After leaving his roots in the Chicagoland area, Hemingway became a prolific author and world traveler, venturing from Kansas City to Paris and then through Spain, Africa, and Cuba.