Anyone who lives in Chicago who has any artistic ambition whatsoever has seriously considered, at least once, moving away. All the real action, it seems, is elsewhere, and if anyone outside the midwest is going to pay you any attention, you’re going to have to head to one of the coasts, where you can spend the rest of your life wallowing in nostalgia for how young and free you were in Chicago.
The cast of characters in Chicago Renaissance is enormous, and Olson doesn’t always resist the temptation to focus on the better-known figures—how many times do we need to hear about how much Hemingway hated his mother or what a charming goofball Gertrude Stein could be? Olson also has a tendency to repeat material, which is fine if you forget who Manierre Dawson was (a Chicago modernist painter who earned his living as an engineer), but less so when you read about how Monroe wrote the opening ode for the 1893 Columbian Exposition on page 45 and then again on page 50.
By Liesl Olson (Yale) Book launch Wed 9/27, 7:30 PM Women & Children First 5233 N. Clark 773-769-9299womenandchildrenfirst.com Free
