1Michelle E. Moore, Chicago and the Making of American Modernism. Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict

2London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 247. ISBN: 9781350018037

3Andreas Hübner, Leuphana University Lüneburg

4American modernist writers are rarely associated with turn-of-the-century Chicago and its literary scene. In the decades after the Great Fire of 1871, the city built a profit-centered reputation modernist writers were typically trying to resist. In Chicago, patronage and commercial boosterism lingered alongside evangelicalism and provincialism, even as city leaders envisioned a “higher life”: a spiritual, physical, and artistic evolution of Chicago. Art and literary projects were to showcase the city’s cultural progress; museums, symphonies, and operas to improve the city’s status. In this atmosphere, literary realism began to flourish in Chicago, thrived during the days of the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893, and continued to reign thereafter, with writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Henry Blake Fuller at the forefront.

6Chicago and the Making of American Modernism is divided into two parts, “The Fire, The Columbian Exhibition, and The Boosters” and “Making Modernism Out of Chicago.” Each part assesses a group of writers more or less closely connected with Chicago and its literary scene. In Part One, Moore addresses the writings and actions of Henry Blake Fuller, Harriet Monroe, Edgar Lee Masters, and Sherwood Anderson. Fuller, a “Midland realism” protégé, who spent his life in Chicago, showcases Moore’s line of argumentation: On the one hand, the city elite regarded Fuller’s works as “exactly the right kind of art to promote” (16), on the other hand his writings stood at the beginning of a radical critique of the Windy (16ff). The analysis of Fuller’s life and works also sheds light on the networks of Chicago-based writers: Moore digs deeply into the literary and personal connections that lie amid the city’s salons and magazines. Fuller, Monroe, Masters, and Anderson were well-connected in the city. They joined meetings of literary and social societies and founded civic art organizations like the Little Room, the Cordon Club, or the Cliff-Dweller’s Club, and they published with locally produced but nationally acclaimed periodicals such as Poetry, the Little Review, and the Dial, to mention but a few. Moreover, examining the case of Harriet Monroe, Moore successfully delineates the role of women in the Chicago literary scene—be it as writers, editors, reviewers, or political activists.

7Part Two is dedicated to the Chicago legacy of Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Hemingway seems an easy to understand choice. Although his years in Chicago are often overlooked, Hemingway is well-described as a character who had internalized the Chicago idea of being a “good businessman” (99), while he sought to earn a reputation as a serious modernist. Cather, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald are less associated with the city. Moore includes this prominent group of American modernist writers into her study, claiming their works reflect on Chicago’s peculiar business and artistic environment. Cather’s The Song of Lark, she argues, can be read as a well-informed reference to Henry Blake Fuller’s novel The Cliff-Dwellers (76f) and, more generally, as a “subtle yet biting” critique of the Chicago literary scene (93). Faulkner, who never set foot in Chicago, is quoted calling Chicago artists “puppets” who, as Moore points out, “with few exceptions, leave Chicago and then write endlessly about the city from other places” (134). Stressing Faulkner’s relationship with Sherwood Anderson, Moore examines allusions to Chicago in Mosquitos, Sanctuary, The Wild Palms and in an unpublished introduction of The Sound and the Fury. Each of these novels, she notes, reveal Faulkner’s aesthetic opposition to Chicago’s (literary) capitalism (148). The same, of course, can be said for Fitzgerald. Turning to his short stories and novels, Moore surveys the variety of Chicagoan characters in Fitzgerald’s works and demonstrates how the New York-based writer dissects the connections between money, love, art, and business in Chicago. In Fitzgerald’s oeuvre, Moore concludes, “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 […]” (167).