Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books.
Chicago is too big, enormous in both geography and spirit, to capture in its entirety. Locals understand this. If you find a book set in a nonspecific “Chicago” — a book purporting to take the whole place as its subject, or one that assumes downtown is the entire ethos — you know it was written by someone who only visits.
To write well about Chicago is usually to write about specific blocks, buildings or ethnic enclaves. This is the DNA of Chicago literature: neighborhood as subject, neighborhood as map of the heart.
Of course, what makes a neighborhood isn’t just the people and the map, but history. And Chicago is somewhat unique in its evident layers of time. In no other city of this size and grandeur would the one-story hardware store that’s only open on Wednesdays or the record store that sells 10 LPs a week survive into 2024. It’s possible here to turn a certain corner and forget that it’s not 1973, or 1952, or 1899. Chicago literature, too, tends to take the city’s past as part of its present. If you’re visiting in person or through books, you’d do well to read your way not only into every neighborhood, but into every era of the city.
What should I read to discover the Chicago of yesteryear?Plenty of Chicago reading lists begin and end with the first half of the 20th century, and while I don’t love that, you could do worse than to start with this heady time when the city, in the wake of 1871’s Great Fire, was busy reinventing itself and self-mythologizing.
You can start your old-school deep dive with Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie,” a 1900 realist novel about a Wisconsin girl who comes to Chicago and gets mixed up with everything from acting to robbery.
Next, try Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago Poems,” the collection that contains “Chicago” — the one about the “Hog Butcher for the World … Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders.” Sandburg first published the poem in 1914, in Chicago’s own Poetry magazine, founded two years earlier by Harriet Monroe.
Now a revival is at hand. Microsoft, which needs tremendous amounts of electricity for its growing fleet of data centers, has agreed to buy as much power as it can from the plant for 20 years. Constellation plans to spend $1.6 billion to refurbish the reactor that recently closed and restart it by 2028, pending regulatory approval.
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