16) Writing Chicago

 "FIND A WRITER WHO IS INDUBITALLY AN AMERICAN in every pulse-beat, snort and adenoid, an American who has something new and peculiarly American to say and who says it in an unmistakable American way and nine times out of ten you will find that he has some sort of connection with that gargantuan and inordinate abattoir by Lake Michigan." Borrowing a line from the acerbic H.L. Mencken, writer James Atlas sets the stage for the literary milieu in which novelist Saul Bellow would immerse himself. "Culture in Chicago was a marginal enterprise," Atlas writes. "Dominated by the brute forces of industry, by stockyards and farm-machinery works and automobile assembly lines, it was the city, in Sandburg's famous line, of 'big shoulders." Yet it was also true that Chicago writes crowded the shelves: Frank Norris's The Pit (1903), about wheat speculators on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade; Willa Cater's The Song of the Lark (1915), about a young lady from Nebraska who came to study music in the city; Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), a raw depiction of the harsh existence of a Lithuanian immigrant family in the South Side stockyards; Theodore Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood trilogy, based on the career of Charles T. Yerkes, the Chicago railroad financier, the works of Sherwood Anderson.
 -Humanities, September/October 2000, Volume 21/Number 6