The Chicago Renaissance

At the beginning of the twentieth century Chicago was a city of slaughterhouses, steelworks and immigrants, and a generation of writers decided it deserved poems. Sandburg gave it his verse on smoke and steel, Edgar Lee Masters made the dead of a village cemetery speak and confess at last what they had lived, Sherwood Anderson told the narrow lives of Midwestern small towns. The review Poetry, founded in Chicago in 1912, would also publish the modernists of Europe. This is when American literature stopped looking east.

works 5

• PoetryGeneral William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other PoemsVachel Lindsay · 1913Chicago has just given itself a poetry magazine. These verses are written to be spoken and sung before an audience, to the tune of a hymn.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetrySpoon River AnthologyEdgar Lee Masters · 1915The small towns of the Midwest are then regarded as the home of American virtues, and literature treats them with tenderness. This book makes their dead speak.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryChicago PoemsCarl Sandburg · 1916A city slaughters the animals of the continent and sorts its wheat. These verses take it as their interlocutor and speak to it in the language spoken there.LiteraturePublic domain
• Short storiesWinesburg, OhioSherwood Anderson · 1919These stories make a Middle Western town into a collection of solitudes, in which each person stays shut up inside the truth he has chosen.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelAn American TragedyTheodore Dreiser · 1925The country tells itself at this time that any man can rise if he wants to. This novel takes a boy who has been given nothing, puts that promise into his head, and follows what it makes of him.LiteraturePublic domain