Literary Capital of the West

Literary Capital of the West: Chicago Writing before 1890

This course explores the evolving relationship between Western and urban identities in Chicago writing from the 1840s through the 1880s. Histories of Chicago literature often start around 1890, with the urban sketches of writers like Finley Peter Dunne.

Chicago’s antebellum literature, however, was very different, aimed at rural readers in the city’s railroad empire. After the Civil War, this agrarian focus persisted even as interest in writing about the city itself started to grow.

As we survey these changes we will view many publications in the Newberry’s collections, including the city’s earliest literary paper, the Gem of the Prairie; the poetry in the Haymarket anarchists’ Alarm; Juliette Kinzie’s early settler memoir Wau Bun; and Barriers Burned Away, E.P. Roe’s overnight bestseller about the Great Chicago Fire.

MATERIALS LIST: Instructor-Distributed Materials

First Reading: A PDF reading packet will be provided before the first meeting.