On Chicago: The Chicagoan

"The Chicagoan is alive. He is not cowed: he is not refined away: there is a part of him still which the Machine has not sucked nor the black air blighted. The Chicagoan walks with swift step through the harshness of his city. But his feet are somehow planted on the prairie. His feet have not forgotten the feel of the rich loam: nor the greenness which comes forth from it.

"Do not talk to the Chicagoan! He will talk business. He will talk size. He will talk ugly. He will boast of the steel-strait jacket which has not yet quite girthed him…

"...if Chicago is the city of Hope, the reason is that there, Despair has simply not yet altogether won. Chicago is still fluent, still chaotic. In the black industrial cloak are still interstices of light."

Waldo David Frank (1889-1967)
From: Our America (1919) See the chapter devoted to Chicago.

According to Time Magazine in 1935, "Waldo Frank, 47, is an inverted Theodore Dreiser, a modern transcendentalist, a mystical Marxist. He is also, at times and in spots, a forceful novelist. Combining passion and penetration with plodding Joycean prose and purblind bookishness, he is a perfect layer cake of the admirable and the irritating." A very interesting man and writer who is not often remembered today. He is still read in Latin America.

Photo credit: Miguel Covarrubias