How was it, asks Henry Regnery in his new book, Creative Chicago, that a city of such varied and remarkable accomplishments failed to become a literary center? The book is a collection of essays about several of the writers and publishers who did good work here–and then for one reason or another moved on.
Beginning with an intriguing introduction by Joseph Epstein–a gifted and perceptive writer who fortunately has not moved away–Creative Chicago includes Regnery’s contemplations about the city’s first publisher, Robert Fergus; the publishing firm of Stone & Kimball; the Dial and Chap-Book (with the exception of TriQuarterly the only nationally visible literary periodicals the city has produced to date); the Chicago publishers who brought us Oz and Tarzan; Harriet Monroe and her still-extant (and highly regarded) Poetry; plus three Chicago writers: Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, and Theodore Dreiser. Though not intrinsic to his study of literature in Chicago, the book includes essays on William Rainey Harper and Robert Maynard Hutchins–both presidents of the University of Chicago–and Louis Sullivan, who like some of Chicago’s early literary figures died forgotten by the city that he helped define and place in the world’s imagination.
Regnery goes on to say, “The question reasonably follows: If the means to establish such institutions [the Art Institute, other museums and libraries, the CSO, and the University of Chicago] were available, why not the far more modest support for the enterprises that would have made it possible for Chicago to keep its authors and become a literary center?”
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Regnery’s own father, a successful textile manufacturer who, the reader assumes, offered young Henry more support than Melville Stone had granted his son, advised him, “If you ever start making money in that business you are going into, you’ll probably be publishing the wrong sort of books.”
Publishers such as those, however, are not really part of the story Regnery wants to tell–they are publishers of information, not ideas; Regnery’s firm, and the New York publishers who spirited away some of the Chicago writers once published here (Epstein comments that success here seemed, to many, bush-league success at best), published ideas. A publisher of textbooks doesn’t need the “apparatus on which a publisher depends,” in Regnery’s words–the literary agents, book clubs, review media, influential magazines. He simply needs compositors and printers to manufacture his books and trains on which to ship them, and in those Chicago abounded.
One might think that in a city the size of Chicago–a city that is currently hosting some of the nation’s most brazen bookstore battles–there would be some print forum for considering recent books that take the city as its subject, or are written or published locally. But this is not the case. Our two best-known local bookstores–Stuart Brent’s and Kroch’s & Brentano’s–have never been much noted for supporting local literary efforts (the Barnes & Noble stores, however, are), nor have our major newspapers. Sure, fancy friends of some authors will turn out for publication parties, but the invitation lists make no effort at community building. The Tribune can command a nice audience for its announcement of the Heartland Prizes (as well as give them a lot of ink), but Friends of the Chicago Public Library finds selling tables for its Carl Sandburg Awards ball arduous at best.
