Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism is the first full-length study of the vexed relationship between Americas great modernist writers and the nations second city. Michelle E. Moore explores the ways in which the defining writers of the eraWilla Cather, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgeraldengaged with the city and reacted against the commercial styles of "Chicago realism" to pursue their own, European-influenced mode of modernist art. Drawing on local archives to illuminate the literary culture of early 20th-century Chicago, this book reveals an important new dimension to the rise of American modernism.