Work must be studied in relation to the time in which it presented its contrasts, insisted upon its virtues and got itself into human view.
Frank Lloyd Wright “Louis Sullivan: His Work” (1924)
I came back from the New York Tristan and advertising campaigns with a number of good advertisements, but Chicago firms refused to contribute their quota. Marshall Field and Company was obdurate because it saw no reason to support an art magazine which didn’t send it thousands of customers.
Margaret C. Anderson My Thirty Years’ War: An Autobiography (1930)
A great deal of scholarship has been written about Cather and Nebraska, Cather and Pittsburgh, Hemingway and Paris, Fitzgerald and Paris, and Faulkner and New Orleans. But none of these writers have been fully considered within the context of Chicago. Cather circumvented Chicago to go to Pittsburgh, but remained in contact with the city for most of her life because of her childhood friend from Red Cloud, Irene Miner Weisz, who married a Chicago businessman. Her early work shows her deep knowledge of the Chicago literary scene. Although Hemingway lived in Chicago only briefly from 1920 to 1921, he grew up only ten miles away and the city exerted a profound and far-reaching influence on him. He met the new literary celebrity Sherwood Anderson while living on North Dearborn Street, who proved to be an impressive and important contact for introductions in Paris and in the publishing world. Also, during this time, Hemingway wrote short sketches of Chicago for the Toronto Star that demonstrate his extensive knowledge of Chicago turn-of-the-century literary urban realism from which he borrows his form. In Hemingway’s later works, there are often brief references to Chicago, which may be read as a critique of the Chicago literary scene, as well as an acknowledgment of his own history with the city. Faulkner, too, sought out Anderson, in New York and New Orleans, and makes sly references to Chicago in his early columns for The Mississippian and in later works that may be read as an extended conversation about Chicago’s literary scene and Anderson. Fitzgerald knew Anderson in New York by 1922 and visited the Chicago area twice, in June 1915 and in August 1916, to possibly see Ginevra King, with whom he had fallen in love. Fitzgerald was also friends with the Chicagoan Gordon McCormick at Princeton and would be inspired by his extended family, the Medills and the Pattersons, to write stories about fragile and wild rich girls who marry rich boys.
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism demonstrates how commercial fare, for Cather, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, will be associated with the worst tendencies of the Chicago realists and the advertising man, Anderson, who played the artistic market. Each writer’s references to Chicago in their major works can be read as signposts that reveal each writer’s struggle over style: whether to write the easily published and profitable Chicago realism that would make writing useful and utilitarian, or the less profitable, but European, high modernist symbolism.
The book rectifies the omissions in existing scholarship by examining the place and uses of Chicago in the fiction of four American modernist writers—Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In doing so, the book highlights American modernist writers’ engagement with the Chicago art scene and the ways in which these writers sought to define their writing and American modernism by writing against the temperament and constrictions of the art scene in Chicago. The establishment in Chicago that the modernists were resisting is quite simply the entire establishment in small-town Chicago: the businessmen boosters and their wives who rebuilt Chicago from the ashes, the turn-of-the-century evangelical movements, and the Chicago literary realists.
The Chicago Club began in the late nineteenth century and continues to the present as the place where business deals happen. The most elite businessmen belonged to this club and so the Club represents the Chicago business establishment, those men who can afford to fund art projects and create buildings for symphonies, operas, and art: Potter Palmer, Marshall Field, Oscar Meyer, Louis Armour, George Pullman, William McCormick Blair, Robert R. McCormick, John R. Lindgren, and others. After the Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed most of the city, including the Chicago Club’s first clubhouse, members quickly contacted connections to the East Coast and Europe to help them rebuild. They brought in architects and promised that the city would be ready to host the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893. They wished to “boost” the city to a higher level in order to “boost” business. Their brand of optimistic cheerleading for Chicago became quickly known as “boosterism.” All discussion of Chicago, whether in art, criticism, or to the newspapers, needed to uplift the city’s stature. The city would get its art museum, symphony, and opera, but only because it would help uplift the stature of the city and ultimately increase sales, expand industry, and generate profit. The Chicago Tribune’s art critics, ultimately answering to their owner Robert McCormick, did not understand the modern art and so skewered it publicly. If art must be seen as uplifting in Chicago, modern art, itself a self-reflecting and critical form, will fail at this task. Modernists, like Margaret C. Anderson, could not get funding for their projects easily because the shepherding and publishing of avant-garde literature served no purpose in increasing business for the Chicago commercial establishment.
In 1857, Robert W. Patterson founded Lake Forest College as a deeply committed Presbyterian alternative to Methodist Northwestern University. In 1860, abolitionists founded Wheaton College twenty-five miles west of Chicago to educate “in the evangelical Protestant tradition.” In early 1886, D. L. Moody established the Chicago Evangelization Society for the “education and training of Christian workers, including teachers, ministers, missionaries, and musicians who may completely and effectively proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.” By the late nineteenth century, Chicago had a large number of evangelical churches and believers in the uplifting power of Jesus Christ. The core of nineteenth-century evangelicalism was the experience of conversion. It was not simply something that people believed in faithfully, but something that happened to them completely. The transformation left them with a fundamentally altered sense of self, an identity as a new kind of Christian who must now tell others of their conversion experience in order to save souls. The evangelical movement in Chicago formed a religious establishment that worked alongside the businesses to uplift the city. For the evangelicals, the idea of uplift had specifically spiritual meanings and art, therefore, needed to help the process of conversion. Henry Blake Fuller, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all mention and write against the way in which Chicago blends business, religion, and art. Modernist writers writing against Chicago are writing against this tendency, rather than any single religious figure.
By the first decades of the twentieth century, a Chicago literary establishment had emerged. Although many of the writers would despise the way in which their art was used by the Chicago boosters to boost the profile of the city, each achieved literary fame because of the booster’s involvement. Carl Sandburg and Upton Sinclair wrote gritty works that exposed the dark recesses of Chicago business and were heralded by the Chicago socialists and unions for using art as a tool to help uplift the worker. Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson exposed the realistic underside of the American small town, inadvertently championing the new urbanism represented by Chicago by the boosters. Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, and Sherwood Anderson mapped the late nineteenth-century landscapes of America, providing a road map for the speculators who wished to make money from small-town tourism and train travel. Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald would see these writers and their work as emblematic of the worst tendencies of Chicago art: realism, use-value, and commercial boosterism.
There have been multiple books that consider Chicago modernism, but none addresses the difficult question why so many artists and writers left Chicago. Sue Ann Prince’s edited collection Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940 comes the closest to considering Chicago with a similar lens as my book. Prince organized the essays in order to address the “bitter struggle between an old guard and an avant-garde for at least three decades” in Chicago.1 The essays in the collection consider visual art, particularly painting, and taken together argue that modernism as a progressive form of European art was not accepted by a Chicago art establishment that was more concerned with Francophile art. Various essays show how clubs and guilds developed in response to the onslaught of European art, best seen in the organized responses to the Armory Show of 1913. Taken together, the essays in the collection lay the groundwork for the view of Chicago’s art scene that Chicago and the Making of American Modernism argues was hostile to the literary forms of interest to Cather, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.
The collection Chicago Modern 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, edited by Elizabeth Kennedy, surveys early modernism as it was done by Chicago artists, and argues that Chicago art pursued the individuation of the artist, who, in living apart from the art centers of New York or Paris, could be free of regimentation. In the introduction, Kennedy acknowledges the provincialism of Chicago, but claims that this fact exerted no more sway over the city’s artists than the great art schools of the East’s major cities did in their push toward an artistic conformity. The entire collection continues the vision first expressed by Chicago art critic C. J. Bulliet who declared in 1935 that the city celebrated “individualism as opposed to regimentation.”2
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism shows how American writers had to think about Chicago, its literature and its industry, in order to construct a new American modernism that speaks to the new European avant-garde while remembering the recent struggles of establishing an American literature apart from Europe. My book emerged from three simple questions: If Chicago was so free and avant-garde, why did so many significant writers and artists leave as quickly as they could? More importantly, why did they write such scathing critiques of Chicago in their work once they were firmly ensconced in the art scenes of New York or Europe? Last, why are the relationships between the Chicago business world and the art scene not understood and explored in literary histories?
Part One, “The Fire, the Columbian Exhibition, and the Boosters,” draws a picture of the artistic climate in Chicago in the decades after the fire and presents the people, salons, and publications that attempted to fight this climate. Its purpose is twofold: to give the reader a history of Chicago and to explain the myriad of literary and artistic responses to the increasingly patronizing climate.
Chapter 1, “Henry Blake Fuller and Chicago,” shows how Fuller understood that it was possible to have towns, cities, and countries that supported the arts rather than suppressing them and degrading their importance. He saw Chicago as choosing the latter route and he would spend his life writing and living in opposition to the implied and stated values of what he saw as the vulgar commercialism of Chicago. He was a prominent and active member of the Little Room, an arts club that began in 1898 and met regularly on Friday evenings in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building. The chapter shows how the club designed its purpose as providing solace and protection for artists against the harsh forces of the Chicago business world. The club fell apart when Garland drew the male members away to form his all–male club, The Cliff Dwellers, that had an opposite purpose: to link together Chicago’s art and business. Fuller would always be drawn to those artists who lived in opposition to the stated values of Chicago and they to him. He would never leave Chicago permanently, but lived surrounded by those who saw in him a beacon of hope for the artists of Chicago.
Chapter 2 reads Harriet Monroe’s life as a poet and as an early supporter of the “new” in art against her life as a Chicagoan. It traces her involvement with the Columbian Exhibition, from her first commissioning to write the “Columbian Ode,” through her negotiations with the committee for ownership rights and control, to her copyright lawsuit with the New York World that changed copyright laws and granted ownership of unpublished work to artists. Her adept management of the committee and legal action when her inherent rights were violated show her to be both a savvy businesswoman and an artist interested in original and new forms, whatever they may be. It then places her victory for artists’ rights within the context of her involvement with the Chicago Workers’ Rights Movement and Arts and Crafts movement, and the Little Room’s pushback against the Chicago business world. Ultimately, the chapter argues that she won respect from the Chicago business world and its artists because of her lawsuit to protect her copyright and deep concerns about the treatment of artists. She stayed in Chicago and started Poetry magazine, because she considered herself and the magazine as a kind of beacon for the artists of the city, a Jane Addams for the artists. She feared that if she left, the hope of the Little Room would be completely extinguished.
Chapter 3 considers Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson and draws from their collections at the Newberry Library in Chicago to show the ways in which each writer wrote about Chicago privately, despite their contradictory public statements. Masters named the close association between the Chicago business and art scene as detrimental to artists, especially with regard to the way in which art critics manipulated the scene for the newspapers. Although Sherwood Anderson extolled the virtues of Chicago publicly, he writes repeatedly in private letters dated 1915 through the 1920s about the distaste he has for Chicago’s inhabitants and its art scene steeped in utilitarian social realism and patronage. The chapter argues how Anderson became a modern craftsman after working for Frank Lloyd Wright in 1915 as a way to combat the commercial art scene in Chicago. Both writers left Chicago, despite being permanently linked to the city they would come to despise.
Part Two, “Making Modernism Out of Chicago,” reveals Cather’s, Faulkner’s, Hemingway’s, and Fitzgerald’s critique of the Chicago scene and illuminates how each writer engaged both the scene and each other to develop a new American modernism.
Chapter 4, “Willa Cather and Chicago,” illustrates the writer’s long relationship to the city and her necessary and ongoing engagement with its art scene and critics. The first section chronicles Cather’s relationship to Elia Peattie, the Chicago journalist, which begins in Omaha, Nebraska, and continues after the Peatties moved to Chicago and became a central part of the literary and arts scene. The second section gives an extended reading of Cather’s novel Song of the Lark (1914) and argues that the novel is an extended critique of the Chicago scene that expects art to be useful (whether as social realism or to raise the city’s higher life), treats art as business, and destroys artists by using them. The novel should be read as Cather’s explanation for why she can never move to or settle in Chicago, despite the friends she has and keeps there. The last section shows Cather’s professional relationship to the Chicago Tribune’s art critic Fanny Butcher. Butcher loved and had a sophisticated understanding of the commercial aspect of writing, and she helped Cather sell books in Chicago and across the county, but Cather’s letters to and about Butcher reveal her continued exhaustion with Butcher’s Chicago methods and ideas that made art into a business.
Chapter 5, “Hemingway and Chicago,” shows how Hemingway internalized the particularly Chicagoan idea about being a “Good Businessman” and doing good at business while growing up in Oak Park. It considers his Chicago influences and argues that Henry Blake Fuller and Edwin Balmer were instrumental in Hemingway’s formation as a young writer. The chapter then shows how he fuses Fuller’s realist critique of Chicago businessmen and Balmer’s realistic genre fiction about lie detection with the poetics of Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson in order to create a new method of writing about bad business. The final section of the chapter shows how once in Paris, Hemingway will continue to write about business and embody the businessman he grew up thinking about as a model for masculinity. The chapter ultimately argues that Hemingway writes about Chicago in order to directly address the contradictions inherent in his upbringing and art scene: the city that is hostile to modern art and those writers who help Hemingway form his craft and help him make money. His rebellion against Chicago helped develop the art that would make him famous as he rethought the Chicago realist and literary tradition in an attempt to create the new, modern American novel.
Chapter 6, “Faulkner and Chicago,” demonstrates that Faulkner was fully aware of the popular Chicago literary scene, and after meeting Anderson became aware that Anderson played the Chicago scene publicly and complained bitterly about the scene privately. His connection to Anderson personalized Faulkner’s internal debate about what the new American modernism would look like. The chapter’s first section examines Faulkner’s critique of the Chicago artist in his early novel The Mosquitoes (1927). He constructs the novel as an allusion to Herman Melville’s Confidence Man (1857) and, in doing so, transforms his initial criticisms of Anderson and the Chicago scene from a straight parody to darker, more unsettled ideas about fake artistry and the business of writing for profit and reputation. The Mosquitoes maps Faulkner’s young struggle with what he sees as the best-selling, yet sentimental and propagandistic, art coming from Chicago’s artists. The second section considers Faulkner’s often-repeated statement that the South imports its models from the North and that this action results in the simultaneous importation of corruption and violence. It argues that Sanctuary, like Hemingway’s early stories, relies heavily on popular Chicago characters and ideas, particularly the gangster and the Little Review’s publication of Ulysses, in order to draw a sly critique of the ways in which Chicago’s marriage of art and commerce has infected all of American literature. The chapter’s last section considers Wild Palms, Faulkner’s only novel that takes place partially in Chicago and shows that the novel is his final, most blatant, and serious attempt to explain the relationship between his modern Southern writing and Chicago, its writers, and its history.
The final chapter, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Chicago,” traces the histories of the four Chicago families Fitzgerald knew—the Kings, the Medills, the McCormicks, and the Pattersons—in order to show who Fitzgerald drew from when writing about Chicago men and women in his fiction. The chapter offers new material as to where he found ideas for major characters, such as The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan. These Chicago families represent a specific kind of wealth built by grandparents who built their businesses in the mid- to late nineteenth-century period of wildly unregulated capitalism. Fitzgerald is most interested in those Chicagoans who now live, work, and vacation together in a closed and clannish society of the extremely rich. His work uses these types, mash-ups of real people he met briefly or knew deeply throughout his life in order to show the ways in which his fictional drawing of a type is more realistic than Hemingway’s or Cather’s careful renderings of real individuals in fictional guise. Fitzgerald’s work argues that the habits, fashions, and ideologies of the very rich Chicago families have had a destructive impact on Americans, because their ideologies became the ideologies of the intellectual elite and the middle to lower classes who imitate them. The chapter’s final section reads across Fitzgerald’s Chicago plots and suggests that his novels are his attempt to work out the relationship of art to business in American writing.
The book balances Chicago’s history, literary biography, and literary criticism while foregrounding new archival documents and letters to produce new readings of much-read texts. This book relies heavily on archival material to demonstrate each individual writer’s relationship to Chicago, their personal feelings about Chicago and its art scene, and their use of Chicago in literature. The result is a strong picture of how Chicago and the idea of Chicago influenced, for better and for worse, American literary modernism.