Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson, and: Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict by Michelle E. Moore

Abstract

Reviewed by: Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson, and: Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict by Michelle E. Moore Beth Widmaier Capo Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis. By Liesl Olson. Yale University Press, 2017. 400 pp. Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict. By Michelle E. Moore. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 264 pp. Can beauty and business, poetry and porkpacking create a vibrant artistic culture, or are they antithetical and alienating to writers? Two recent monographs come to different answers to this question of modernism and the Chicago Renaissance. Liesl Olson’s Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis argues for Chicago’s unique contributions to modernism. Beginning with the Chicago Literary Renaissance of the 1890s through 1920s, featuring Harriet Monroe and Sherwood Anderson, and continuing through the 1930–1950 Chicago Black Renaissance of Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, Olson offers a rich cultural and literary history that contributes significantly to scholarship on American literature. She argues that Chicago was the center of American modernism. Michelle Moore’s Chicago and the Making of American Modernism: Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, [End Page 173] and Fitzgerald in Conflict focuses on eight writers’ antipathy toward the city’s business ethos. Its contribution lies in documenting connections between these writers and their public and private references to Chicago’s commercialism. Olson’s Chicago Renaissance offers a fascinating, extensively researched, and engagingly written argument aimed at a wide audience. This reach is signaled by interesting titles (e.g., “Porkpackers and Poetry”) and subtitles (“Naughty People”), eighty-eight images, and brief narrative “Interludes” between chapters. Olson “was in search of a book that would give [her] a sense of Chicago’s relation to the social and aesthetic revolutions of the first decades of the twentieth century” and, when she didn’t find one, wrote it herself (xv). The result, integrating archival work with close reading, argues that “Chicago was an extremely important site of modernist literary production through the first half of the twentieth century, at the center of an unfolding dialogue among writers, critics, institutions, and artists about what it means to be modern” (xvii). Its geographic location, patronage of the arts by business leaders, and lack of cultural tradition enabled artistic freedom in a multiplicity of styles. In addition to the Chicago connections, Olson focuses on how writers, including Hemingway and Stein, aimed for mainstream readers; she successfully hits this target as well (xix). Olson, director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library and author of Modernism and the Ordinary (2009), makes her argument in five chapters, an introduction, conclusion, and five narrative “Interludes.” The introduction uses the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 to establish Chicago as a place of growth, renewal, and transformation. Brief discussions of early Chicago realist writers and their works, including Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), demonstrate that “the greatest Chicago literature is not always about Chicago” (8) nor by writers from Chicago, and that “the subject matter of each novel is perhaps more radical than its aesthetic method” (11). Chicago modernism is not a coherent aesthetic. Chapter 1’s focus on Harriet Monroe establishes the linear organization of Chicago Renaissance but also its sense of connection and recurring characters. Highlighting Monroe’s democratic view of audience and editorial influence on modernism, Olson connects Monroe’s “openness to outside influence” (55) to Chicago’s importance [End Page 174] as a railroad crossroads. The financial support Monroe solicited from those “who had made recent fortunes from Chicago’s rapid growth” (80), including the Swift meatpacking empire, enabled her to recognize artistic labor’s value by paying contributors to Poetry, the magazine she edited. Chapter 2 describes the public reception of the 1913 Armory Show, the International Exhibition of Modern Art that introduced America to controversial avant-garde movements such as Impressionism and Cubism, and its impact on Monroe, Sherwood Anderson, and others. Lacking an artistic tradition, Chicago was more open to the radicalness of European modernism (101). Olson details the...