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The Chicago Renaissance
The Renaissance led Baltimorean H.L. Mencken to call Chicago “the literary capital of the U.S.”
I didn’t know it, but there was a literary Chicago Renaissance. It ran roughly from the founding of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse in 1912 and ended when Ben Hecht moved to New York in 1924.
I guess it was quite “a thing” during those dozen years, but it didn’t amount to much:
“Would that our writing had been as fine as our lunches,”
is how Hecht put it.
The Renaissance rose with the vigorous life that was Chicago. Chicagoan Joseph Epstein writes about Chicago in the generation before his birth:
“Chicago in those days presented the grand spectacle of the nation’s most cynical politics, endless opportunities for big financial scores, and assorted social classes, ethnic groups, hustlers, marks, freaks, dorks, and yokels going at one another nearly full-time.”
Such a free-wheeling city allowed for free-wheeling journalism. “Newspapers,” says Epstein, “were wide open: one could still print, over the story of a dentist arrested for rape, the headline, ‘Dentist Filled Wrong Cavity”; one could still quote a man, asked on the gallows if he had anything further to say, answering, ‘Not at this time.’”
