Great Chicago Writers to Read During the Lockdown Part 3
Today we continue our look at great Chicago authors and excellent stories set in Chicago to check out while staying indoors and practicing social distancing. With the current climate so heavy with bad news concerning the coronavirus, sometimes the best thing to do is get lost in a book where a great author can take your mind off things and provide a much-needed escape. So let’s take a look at few more writers who have called Chicago home or made the city the setting for their classic works.
Richard Wright: Though born in Mississippi, Wright really developed his writing style after moving with his family to Chicago in 1927. Witnessing poverty firsthand and fed up with American capitalism, Wright joined the Communist Party in 1932, a move that profoundly influenced his writing to come. Wright released Native Son in 1940, and it became the first book by an African-American writer to be selected for the Book of the Month Club. Native Son tells the tale of a 20-year old African-American man living in the poverty of 1930s South Side Chicago and the choices he makes in an environment dominated by systematic racial oppression. The success of the novel, and others by Wright, including Uncle Tom’s Children and his autobiography Black Boy, made the author one of the leading literary voices of the African-American community.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: One of the world’s most popular authors for generations, Burroughs was born in Chicago in 1875. Mixing fantasy, adventure, and science fiction into his works, Burroughs influenced many of these genre’s top creators, including Ray Bradbury, Jerry Siegel (creator of Superman), and George Lucas, to name a few. Burroughs published the Martian adventure Under the Moon of Mars in serial form in 1912 and instantly earned success with the series, which went on to become popularly known as John Carter of Mars. Of course, his most famous contribution to the fiction world was the creation of Tarzan of the Apes. The character, a descendant of English nobility raised by apes in the jungle before eventually encountering the Western World, was a huge cultural hit upon his first appearance in 1912, and Rice’s creation continues to find readers to this day via books, comics, and movies.
Ernest Hemingway: No list of Chicago writers would be complete without Oak Park born Ernest Hemingway. A significant influence on 20th-century literature thanks to his simple, direct writing style that did away with adornment, Hemingway produced classics that readers return to again and again. The writer’s experience serving as an ambulance driver in World War I served as the basis for one of his most famous works, A Farewell to Arms. Upon returning to Chicago after the war, Hemingway married and moved to Paris, where he rubbed shoulders with contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. In 1926 while abroad, Hemingway released his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, widely considered his most significant work. That novel has fierce competition, though. Hemingway went on to write instant classics that have stood the test of time includes To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bells Tolls, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway was a larger-than-life figure who used his penchant for adventure and to the point writing style to enthrall readers until his suicide in 1961.
That does it for great Chicago writers to check out while stuck inside for the foreseeable future. While this is by no means a complete list, each of these writers has given us amazing stories that have stood the test of time with the city of Chicago being the tie that binds them all together.
ERIC KAPLAN AND DEAN’S TEAM CHICAGO
