American Writers Museum set for 2017

Chicago will be getting a new museum in 2017, and its venue will be unique to the United States: the first museum to speak about American writers as a group. The American Writers Museum will be located at 180 N. Michigan Avenue, at Michigan and Lake Street. 

This museum will be an excellent way for anyone to get the equivalent exposure to American Literature that one might normally get in a college survey course. Which 150 books by American authors are the ones that cannot be missed? That is the question...

The organizers are hoping for annual attendance at 120,000 annual entries for its early years, and it will occupy a space of 11,000 square feet.  Donations are currently being accepted to help cover the costs of installation and the first three years of operating costs. To get involved, visit the museum website.

LINKS

Steve Johnson, "New American Writers Museum is slated to open in 2017 on Michigan Avenue" Chicago Tribune (October 27, 2015).

The American Writers Museum (http://americanwritersmuseum.org).

Nelson Algren, the film

2013 film trailer, featured at the 2015 Chicago Film Festival: Nelson Algren






To follow more information about this film, check the Facebook page Algren-The Movie and discover the website for the film:
http://www.algrenthemovie.com

The Reader's Spring Books Issue

The Reader's excellent Spring Books Issue (April 22, 2010) features literature covering "aspects of African-American life over the last half century, mainly through the work of local black writers." That includes Black Like Me (1960), written by John Howard Griffin, a white reporter who disguised himself as black, and Angela Jackson's first novel, Where I must go (2009).

Deanna Isaacs, "Black at Northwestern," Reader (April 22, 2010).

Michael Miner, "Black Like Him," Reader (April 22, 2010).

For Carolyn Rodgers

Poet Carolyn Rodgers died on April 2. While growing up in Hyde Park, she studied under Gwendolyn Brooks. Her published works include Paper Soul (1968), Songs of a Black Bird (1969), and How I got Ovah (1976).

Links

Trevor Jensen, "Black Arts Movement poet Carolyn M. Rodgers," Chicago Tribune (April 13, 2010).

Jeff Mays, "Black Arts Movement Star Carolyn M. Rodgers Dead at 69," Black Voices (April 14, 2010).

Bruce Weber, "Carolyn Rodgers, Poet, Is Dead at 69," New York Times (April 19, 2010).

Carolyn M. Rodgers (www.english illinois.edu).

The Poetry behind the City

The Chicago Poetry Tour, narrated by Scott Simon, is now on-line, and you can listen to poetry read by the poets, as you see the sights.

Link

Chicago Poetry Tour (www.poetryfoundation.org)

The Chicago issue of Granta

Granta #108 has just appeared today, and it's all about Chicago. The editor of the issue, John Freeman, talked about it on Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ. According to him, the writers who contributed depict a love-hate relationship with the city. Wole Soyinka's essay on President Obama emphasizes the multi-cultural background that makes him an excellent statesman.

To kick off the issue, some of the contributers are speaking tonight at 6 p.m. in Preston Bradley Hall at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington Street.

Introducing "Chicago" from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

Listen to the WBEZ show, "Eight Forty-Eight" (September 14, 2009)

See Granta's Events in Chicago (www.granta.com)

Achy Obejas and the Havana-Chicago connection

Born in Havana in 1956, Achy Obejas came to the United States as an exile when she was six years old. She obtained a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College (North Carolina), and began working for the Chicago Tribune in 1992, reporting mainly about arts and culture, including the Pope's visit to Cuba in 1998 and the arrival of Al-Queda prisoners in Guantnamo. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her journalism as well as the Studs Terkel Journalism Prize (1996).

After a decade of intensive journalism, Achy Obejas has proved her ability to branch out by translating and writing short stories, a novel and poetry, so it's little surprise to discover that she was a visiting instructor at the University of Chicago and that she is currently the Sor Juana Visiting Writer at DePaul University.  This coming week on November 2, she'll be speaking and reading from her poetry at the Poetry Foundation in the company of Mark Doty as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Read more about it here.

Her publications include: We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994), Memory Mambo (1996), and Days of Awe (2001).

Chicago comes up in "The Art of the City" conference

Although New York gets the most attention, a number of cities are represented, at "The Art of the City Conference" to be held at the University of Toulouse, November 6-8, 2008. The program indicates at least four papers touching on Chicago: one each about Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, and Saul Bellow, and another entitled "White city, Dark City: Chicago 1893."

Where have the writers gone?

Remember the days before internet and interactive internet 2.0?  This advertisement appeared in an international issue of Time (May 22, 1989) and was sponsored by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, with a fax number for their office in Brussels.  Today I went looking for something similar from this agency through their web site. Not only is this text unavailable, but all allusions to Chicago's writers seem to have disappeared.  The general tourism pages on enjoyillinois.com are excellent with regard to monuments, museums and shopping, as  noted in a previous entry, but what has happened to information about writers? Was their presence seen as more of a harm than a help?  This ad from 1989 may indeed be a bit cheeky, but why have writers altogether disappeared from the agency's web site?

The text from the 1989 ad reads (and the choice to quote here is not without admiration for the anonymous author, who had done his/her homework):

Looking at the prominence of its financial institutions, some people would assume that Chicago's literary output consists chiefly of bank statements and stock portfolios.  

    That's pure fiction.

    Chicago, in fact, has provided sanctuary and inspiration to some of the greatest poets, novelists and journalists of our time.

    It was here (in nearby Oak Park) that Hemingway was born.  Here, as a boy, that he visited the Field Museum of Natural Hisotry, and spent hours fueling his imagination in the Hall of African Mammals.  Here that he attended his first prizefight.  It was here that the poet Carl Sandburg, enthralled with his "City of the Big Shoulders", rose to become America's foremost literary journalist.  

    It was here that The Little Review, a forerunner of the Greenwich Village bohemianism of the 1920's, challenged censorship laws by serialising James Joyce's Ulysses.  Here that Harriet Monroe founded Poetry, the magazine that helped establish the reputations of such prestigious poets as Edgar Lee Masters and T.S. Eliot.

    And it was here that Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Frank Norris drew inspiration for a body of work that would become central to the development of American literature.  An achievement which could only occur in a city Norman Mailer once described as "the last of the great American cities".  A city bursting with energy, rich with stimuli.

    Railroads.  Stockyards.  Architecture.  Neighborhoods.

    The neighborhoods, in particular, spawned still another generation of Chicago literary talent.  Writers like Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright.  Writers who painted a powerful, gritty, unforgettable portrait of modern urban life. 

    Today, that literary tradition is still here.  In the novels of Nobelist Saul Bellow.  In the plays of David Mamet.  And in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black ever to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. 

    (....)

    You've read the book.  Now see the city.

The Black Metropolis in 1945

Relationships between whites and blacks have often been sources of tension in Chicago, continuing along with the population changes brought by the “Great Migration.” Between 1916 and 1970 the population of African Americans increased by 500,000. Before 1916, African Americans constituted approximately 2% of the city’s population (approximately 15,000 in 1893), rising to 33% by 1970 (approx. 1,111,887 in 1970). War industries required more workers by 1916 and 1942, and advertised enticing employment opportunities. But upon arrival in Chicago, African Americans were to discover an increasingly bleak housing situation, due to restrictive covenants defining the areas where they were allowed to live. Rents were high and the landlords did not bother to maintain buildings. Living conditions were so bad that St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s study, The Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945) gave a detailed account of the segregation the Black Belt in Chicago perpetuated, that included descriptions of housing conditions. 

The book was based on research conducted by the Works Progress Administration field workers in the late 1930s. As could be expected, in anticipation of what would become a full-blown Civil Rights movement in the 1950s that forced people to take sides based on their acceptance—or denial—of the presence of a race, reviewers were already divided about the book’s impact and value. Rosalind Lepawsky, reacting to Richard Wright’s introduction, which called the book a “landmark of research and scientific achievement,” wrote in her 1946 review: 

"…Black Metropolis is more of a compilation of, than an addition to, existing knowledge about the American Negro. It is not so much an explanation of Negro class and caste as it is an effective indictment of Negro suppression and white supremacy."

 

Remarkable however is the way Black Metropolis impacted the locals: shortly after it was published, the Parkway Community House held a series of public forums to discuss the issues the book had raised.  But more important, the work behind Black Metropolis was a contributing factor for African American artists, as Richard Wright had suggested in his introduction to the work:

"Chicago is the city from which the most incisive and radical Negro thought has come; there is an open and raw beauty about that city that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life. I felt those extremes of possibility, death and hope, while I lived half hungry and afraid in a city to which I had fled with the dumb yearning to write, to tell my story. But I did not know what my story was, and it was not until I stumbled upon science that I discovered some the meanings of the environment that battered and taunted me. I encountered the work of men who were studying the Negro community, amassing facts about urban Negro life, and I found that sincere art and honest science were not far apart, that each could enrich the other. The huge mountains of fact piled up by the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago gave me my first concrete vision of the forces that molded the urban Negro’s body and soul. (I was never a student at the university; it is doubtful if I could have passed the entrance examination).

Chicago is the known city; perhaps more is known about it, how it is run, how it kills, how it loves, steals, helps, gives, cheats, and crushes than any other city in the world. Chicago is a new city; it grew to be bigger in one hundred years than did Paris in two thousand." 

Some Links about Black Metropolis

The Black Metropolis Research Consortium

Chicago's Black Metropolis: Understanding History Through a Historic Place (Lesson Plans)

Black Metropolis, The Last Half Century by Depaul University

Dunbar meets Douglass in Chicago

We weep for him, but we have touched his hand,
And felt the magic of his presence nigh,
The current that he sent throughout the land,
The kindling spirit of his battle cry.
O’er all that holds us we shall triumph yet,
And place our banner where his hopes were set!
— Paul Laurence Dunbar, excerpt from the poem “Frederick Douglass”

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was the nation’s first professional African American poet to be recognized by whites as well as blacks. His talent was evident from High School (where all the other students in his class were white), and he wrote the song used at his graduation ceremony held June 16, 1891.  As a black youth, he could only find a job working as an elevator boy in Dayton, Ohio, the city where he grew up. But he managed to publish his first book of poems, Oak and Ivy (1893) and went to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, initially to peddle the volume in the street to people passing by. There he met the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was then the U.S. Minister to Haiti and the commissioner of the Haitian exhibition. Douglass hired Dunbar as a clerk at the Haitian pavilion, and arranged for Dunbar to read his poems at the Colored American Day celebration held there. This gave Dunbar an opening and he met other African American writers and artists, such as Charlotte Forten Grimké, James Carrothers, James Campbell, and Will Marion Cook. 

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Some Links
Learn more about Frederick Douglass and his role in motivating African Americans to fight for justice:
http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/douglass/part4.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1539.html

The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Washington, D.C.
http://www.nps.gov/archive/frdo/freddoug.html

The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR: Some Links
Read poems from Wright State University’s Paul Laurence Dunbar Digital Collection

Visit the University of Dayton’s Paul Laurence Dunbar Website

The Ohio Historical Society sponsors the Dunbar House, last residence of the poet, in Dayton.

An Egyptian perspective on Chicago

  

The Egyptian author (and dentist)  Alaa Al Aswany (also transcribed as El Aswany) is best known in the Western World for The Yacoubian Building (2002) which was produced as a film in 2006.  The book was translated into English before it became available in French.

Al Aswany's Chicago (2007) was translated into French (2007) before it became available in English (in the UK in fall 2007).   The book arrives in the US in October, as the Chicago Reader noted (February 18, 2008).  Experiences in the book are possibly related to the author's three years residence in Chicago during the 1980s while studying at the University of Illinois Medical School.

Read Reviews:

Marie-Laure Delorme, "Alaa El Aswany, Guerre et peurs," Journal du Dimanche (October 16, 2007).

Stephanie Merritt, "An Author With Bite," The Observer (September 9, 2007).

John R. Bradley, "Chicago: A Modern Arabic Novel," Financial Times (February 16, 2008).

Doug Johnstone, "Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany," in the Times (August 30, 2008).

Mark Rubbo in Readings (Melbourne, Australia; September 2, 2008).

Ed King in the Telegraph (September 7, 2008).

Sameer Rahim in the TLS (September 12, 2008).

Other Links:

Interview with Al Aswany in Egypt Today (August 2004).

Interview with Al Aswany in National Geographic (September 2006).

Read a passage from the French translation of Chicago here.

Biographical information about Al Aswany from Evene.fr.

Interview with Al Aswany, with photos, from Evene.fr (October, 2007).

One blogger's unfavorable review here.

Thomas Pynchon's view of the World Columbian Exposition

Against the Day (2006) by Thomas Pynchon begins in Chicago in 1893 and ends in Paris.

Read reviews of the novel:

Mark Feeney in the Boston Globe (November 19, 2006)

Keith Gessen in New York Magazine (November 22, 2006)

John Leonard in The Nation (November 22, 2006)

James Ladsun in the Guardian (November 25, 2006)

Luc Sante in the New York Review of Books (January 11, 2007)

   See more links at the Complete Review.

GRAAT on-line #3 "Reading Thomas Pynchon's latest novel Against the Day" edited by Gilles Chamerois (March 2008)

Some Links: Haymarket, 1886

Basic information from the Illinois Labor History Society.

Basic information from PBS, Chicago: City of the Century.  About the "Eight Anarchists."

Podcast about Haymarket by James Green and Howard Zinn from WGBH (May 7, 2006) and NPR. James Green's Death in the Haymarket (2006) was reviewed in The Nation, the New York Times (May 7, 2006), and also by Le Mouvement Social (Université de Paris I). 

Read the first chapter of James Green's Death in the Haymarket (2006).  Listen to shorter (7 minute) NPR podcast of James Green talking about his book.

About the Haymarket Affair 1886-1887 from the Library of Congress.

The Dramas of Haymarket by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University.

May 4, 1886, the Haymarket Tragedy from the Chicago Public Library.

"Haymarket Martyr Albert Parsons's Last Words to His Wife" from History Matters.

Homicide in Chicago: 1886, Haymarket Affair from Northwestern University.

The Haymarket Riot Trial (State of Illinois v. Albert Spies, et al., 1886) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.

Haymarket Martyrs Monument at Forest Home Cemetery.

An article published in 1986 from Revolutionary Worker Online.

An analysis from libcom.org.

And, in French, about May 1, 1886.

Artist Mary Brogger was commissioned by the City of Chicago to create a commemorative monument.

Some links: Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984)

BASIC

See a short introduction to Sandra Cisneros on www.salon.com, then listen to Sandra Cisneros read the first pages of The House on Mango Street here. 

Watch a video about Sandra Cisneros, with music and lyrics in Spanish here.

Learn more about Sandra Cisneros on her website.  The Modern American Poetry site also features a biographical note. 

 The novel is described on PBS's The American Novel.  There is also a good introduction from the University of Warwick.

About Cisneros and her book Caramelo (2002) with podcasts from NPR.

REVIEWS

2002, from The Romer Review.

STUDY GUIDES

Questions & Study guide for The House on Mango Street on publisher Random House website.

Excellent lesson plans for teaching The House on Mango Street to 9th graders at Skyline High School by Mary Scott can be found on Urban Dreams.

An interactive feature about the novel for students in grades 9-11 can be found here.

About the Politics of Gender in The House on Mango Street from Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute here.

One college student develops a webpage about the novel.

CRITICAL STUDIES

"The Borderlands of the Chicano Bildungsroman" here.

Crawford-Garrett, Katherine, "Leaving Mango Street: Speech, Action and the Construction of Narrative in Britton's Spectator Stance," Springer, 2008.

Cruz, Felicia J., "On the 'Simplicity' of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street," Modern Fiction Studies 47.4 (Winter 2001), p.910-946.  On MUSE.

Doyle, Jacqueline, "More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street," Melus 19.4 (Winter 1994) p.5-35.  On JSTOR.

RELATED

Learn more about the Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago, called Pilsen, located at 18th Street and Halstead Street from The University of Illinois Neighborhoods Initiative.  Other information about Pilsen can be found on Chicago Neighborhood and City guide.

Learn more about Chicano authors from the Baltimore Sun.    See a teacher's guide to U.S. Latino literature here.

Rudyard Kipling unimpressed (in 1889)

When Rudyard Kipling visited the US in 1889, he was not enthusiastic about Chicago, which in the 1890 census became the Second City of the United States (displacing Philadelphia):

"Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again.  It is inhabited by savages.  Its water is the water of the Hooghly, and its air is dirt.  Also it says that it is the 'boss' town of America.  I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country."

That quotation can be found in chapter five of  American Notes (1891) and was also quoted by A.J. Liebling in Chicago, The Second City (1952).

The complete text of American Notes is available in text format free here (to download) or here (in html format). You can also listen to a reading of the chapter concerning Chicago here (approx 23 minutes).

Chicago according to Rajaa al-Sanie

Rajaa al-Sanie's* novel, Girls of Riyadh (Penguin UK, 2007), was originally published in Arabic in 2005.  Copies continued to circulate, in spite of a ban in Saudi Arabia.  It has since been published in numerous editions (Lebanon, September 2006; French translation, 2007).

One of the characters in the novel, newly married, goes to Chicago with her husband, who is finishing a degree there. Rajaa al-Sanie said she was familiar with El-Aswany's novel Chicago.

She has lived there herself, while studying dentistry...

*Various transliterations of her name exist.

Interview with Rajaa Alsanea in the Telegraph June 30, 2007:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/06/30/smsaudi30.xml

Read a passage from the novel, from Penguin UK website:

http://www.penguin.co.uk/UKExtract/0,,MjM3Njg2MjowOkdpcmxzIG9mIFJpeWFkaA==,00.html

Links:

http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2007/07/profile-rajaa-al-sanie-author-girls-of.html

http://mwawomenmakinghistory.blogspot.com/2006/03/rajaa-al-sanie.html

Arab-American Writers' Conference, Chicago, October 1999

Arab-American Writers chose Chicago as the venue for the first annual National Professional Literary Conference on Arab-American and Ethnic Writing, October 8-10, 1999.  One hundred forty five participants gathered for the various panels, organized by Ray Hanania, including:

"Challenges Facing the Arab-American Writer"

"Writing the Arab American Novel"

"Writing Opportunities in the American Media"

"Addressing the Controversial Issues"

The Keynote speaker Salim Muwakkil (columnist for the Chicago Tribune) spoke on "Challenges Facing Race and Ethnic Writing in America."

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/Jan_Feb_2000/0002086.html

"Fire Sale" starring V.I. Warshawski

V.I. Warshawski has been starring in Sara Paretsky's detective novels since 1982.  When Fire Sale was published in 2006, her role was to investigate her native South Chicago.

Sara Paretsky went to the London Book Fair in 2006 to promote the book, and record is given below:

http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/author_profiles/s_paretsky/s_paretsky.html

Speaker at the Library of Congress (February 27, 2007), Sara Paretsky can be seen speaking about V.I. Warshawski for almost an hour, with a great amount of humor.  At the beginning of her talk, she quoted Hilaire Belloc who once said, "though my sins be scarlett, may my books be read.":

http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4033

Paretsky is involved in a blog called "The Outfit, A Collective of chicago Crime Writers":

http://theoutfitcollective.blogspot.com

Visit her web pages:

http://www.saraparetsky.com/bio.html

"August" first performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago (2007)

Tracy Letts, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for August: Osage County in 2008, lives and works in Chicago. He is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where his play "August" was first staged. Since then, the play has moved on to Broadway...

Charles Isherwood speaks about the play August: Osage County in a theatre review for The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/arts/20070909_LETTS_FEATURE/index.html

Charles Isherwood, "Mama Doesn't Feel Well, but Everyone Else Will Feel Much Worse" (The New York Times, December 5, 2007)