The eight chapters in Part II focus on the most sedentary portion of Ilf and Petrov’s journey, the month they spent in and around New York City in fall 1935 hobnobbing with literary celebrities and immersing themselves in American popular culture. Investigating Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with renowned American artists and authors offers a way of tracing the transnational networks that connected Soviet and American cultural producers. How and what did they learn from each other? Where and why did they fail to understand one another? The role of immigrants in these networks looms large and allows consideration of how Soviet art and Russian artists become “American.” How did Ilf and Petrov make Soviet sense of American culture and American consumption?

The Great Migration, which began in the late nineteenth century and witnessed the movement of more than six million Black folk from the agrarian US South to the urban North between 1919 and 1970, and the flourishing of “Black Renaissances” in Harlem, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other Northern urban centers were the essential soil in which are rooted not only the two works that are the subject of this book, but also the lives and careers of Margaret Bonds, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. This chapter explores the roles of those two large societal seizings of freedom for the poor and oppressed as the context for Margaret Bonds’s career and the source of her career-long commitment to using her art to uplift what she in 1942 called “our oppressed Race” and work for global equality.

This chapter follows microcosmic worlds figured in the skyscraper across three “Chicago Schools”: in architecture, in urban sociology, and in political economy. Three novels map three historical phases: Frank Norris’s The Pit (1902), the financialization of wheat in Chicago’s early skyscrapers; Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), the “color line” and the public sphere on Chicago’s South Side; and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), the landscapes of oil and steel in Dubai. In each the skyscraper appears fleetingly on the horizon, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye as it shifts scales from stage to prop. The three corresponding “Chicago Schools” are: the architects of early skyscrapers assembled around the slogan “form follows function”; the group of urban sociologists that included St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, authors of Black Metropolis (1945); and the economists who supplied the neoliberal precepts by which oil wealth was converted into speculative real estate in Dubai and elsewhere. The article concludes with a coda that records, with reference to the work of urban sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod and the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, the stark divisions of labor that haunt these three “Chicagos” and their skyscrapers, from Lake Michigan to the Persian Gulf.

In this chapter, we look at the basics of referencing and citation: the conventional ways of identifying our sources and for showing where we have applied them in our work. Referencing conventions are catalogued in a relatively small number of documentation styles that are common across different academic disciplines – for example, APA 7, Chicago 17 and MLA 9 styles, which are outlined in this chapter. The chapter is organised in seven different parts. First, we explore the reasons for referencing in academic writing and we look at the different documentation styles used to format references and citations. Next, we survey the essential features that make up a reference and offer some ways of dealing with sources that may not conform to standard referencing templates. We provide detailed instructions on presenting references and citations in the APA 7, Chicago 17 and MLA 9 styles, including using in-text citations and discursive footnotes. The final part of the chapter looks at composing and formatting reference lists.

Alighting briefly once again on Weill’s Symphony No. 2 from the book’s opening, and then turning to consider Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor as a closing case study, Chapter 6 pivots between the early 1930s and the present day to consider the legacies and twentieth-century historiography of the symphonies in the book – their absences and recoveries – and the remarkable persistence of the symphonic genre in the mechanisms of how cultural and political agency is conferred to the present day. The poor reception of Weill’s New York premiere in 1934 comes under examination in light of the discussion in the intervening chapters, raising the question of why, for that time and place, Weill was the wrong kind of symphonist. Then, the chapter addresses the contemporary revival of Price’s symphony in the early 2020s, and it suggests the capacity of symphonies from the tumultuous years around 1933 to invigorate a differently dynamic symphonic landscape and a differently dynamic landscape of selfhood.

Chapter 1 answers the question of what citizens perceptions of the school closure policy are and how these attitudes vary by race. It reveals that African Americans and Latinx citizens – the majority of those affected by the policy – have highly negative attitudes toward public school closures. Whites express the most supportive attitudes toward closure, despite rare experiences with the policy. To explain these disparities, it highlights how African Americans and Latinx shared experiences with previous education policies and shared status as minorities contribute to the development of a shared target identity. Their identification as shared targets result in similar assessments of the closure policy, regardless of whether they are directly affected by it. Whites, in contrast, adopt a viewpoint akin to the purveyors of the policy. These findings have implications for understanding the challenges associated with working across racial lines, toward improved race relations and thus democratic progress.

Chapter 2 looks at how and to whom targeted citizens’ attribute blame and responsibility for school closure actions. In so doing, it brings forth issues of race, and representation, demonstrating the ability of those affected by closure to assign blame based on who holds the most power over closure decisions. In particular, this chapter shows how targets of closure express decreased support for the school district, generally, and decreased support for political actors associated with the policy, specifically the mayor and/or the governor. Further, it reveals how citizens determine the role of race in shaping who to blame more or less for what they are experiencing.

This chapter compares the ways that two similarly sized cities, Chicago and Amsterdam, have chosen to govern their streets. Chicago sold a seventy-five-year concession to manage street parking to a consortium of private investors, whereas Amsterdam’s government maintains the ability to directly govern its streets. In turn, Chicago is an illustration of how privatization of a common good according to money-lending logics, far from allowing for flexibility and efficient governance, completely prevents a city from changing with the times. Chicago has lost control over its own streets and can no longer decide what their best use is without paying an extortionate price. Any governing of a shared communal space that has a broader concern than generating profit for a private corporation is here effectively undermined by allowing marketized parking. For the purposes of this book, the Chicago/Amsterdam comparison illustrates the limitations of using privatized business actors to efficiently govern shared city space. It also serves as a counterexample to the neoliberal dogma that government should abstain from planning, because their attempts at doing so cannot outperform the market.

The Statute of 13 Elizabeth originally appeared merely to prohibit a debtor from fraudulently conveying assets in order to defeat creditors, but it served as the fountainhead of many important principles in American commercial law. Chapter 1 shows how this law came to be applied to negotiations among creditors and their common debtor. This chapter explores how it operated in the wake of the financial failure of Robert Morris at the end of the eighteenth century. Robert Morris had been one of the richest and most prominent men in the country, but he failed spectacularly and pulled many other once successful merchants down with him. This financial catastrophe drew parties to the courthouse, where the judges began with first principles.

Many of the historical and contemporary phenomena in which social scientists are interested are difficult to study using traditional methods of comparative analysis.  Since most cases are complex systems – marked by interdependence and operating at multiple levels of analysis at once – controlling comparisons to adjudicate causality is fraught with difficulty.  This chapter argues that scholars can use historical archival research to help disaggregate the temporal and spatial properties of the phenomena we hope to compare while also tracing connections among those disaggregated elements.  Specifically, practices associated with archival inquiry – classifying, contextualizing, layering, and linking – allow us to identify the boundaries around subsystems that can be treated as relatively independent while identifying the hierarchical connections tying those substemic activities together. The chapter concludes by showing how William Tuttle’s masterful history of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 provides a template for comparing complex cases.

Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition continues to haunt the public and literary imagination. A temporary but massive “city” built in a single park, the Fair was part of a larger sociocultural trend of nineteenth-century exhibitions. This chapter focuses on some of the fiction set at the Chicago Fair, those contemporaneous works written and published around 1893, often by authors who attended the Fair themselves. The temporal proximity of this literature to the event itself provides a useful way to gain insight into the quotidian experiences of tourists to the Fair. Many scholars have looked at these literary works in depth, but my own entanglement with the literary fair is framed by my 2007 and 2008 archaeological survey and excavation of Chicago’s Jackson Park, the former site of the Fair. Although some of the physical remains of the Fair linger into the present, albeit in ruined or heavily modified forms, novels from the Fair addressed the reality that the Fair, though immense, was designed to be temporary. Finally, a look at a more recent wave of literature on the Fair points to the continued interest in and expressive power of the Fair into the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the two Chicago-set graphic novels of Chris Ware entitled Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) and Building Stories (2012), as well as Lost Buildings (2004), Ware’s “on-stage radio & picture collaboration” with Ira Glass for National Public Radio. The chapter argues that Ware’s body of work explores how various human networks engage with the storied history and urban geography of his adopted city, and that it does so in endlessly experimental ways that have continued to redefine the expressive potential of the comics form. In these works, Ware creates complex visual narratives in which the city and its ever-changing urban landscape is often as much of a character as the people inhabiting it, and his meticulously drawn pages are thus an attempt not only to depict and make sense of Chicago but also to create a visual index of the relationship between its spatial and emotional lives. Despite his untraditional choice of form, this approach places him in a lineage of Chicago writers that reaches all the way back to the earliest recorders of life in the city.

This chapter explores the portrayal of Chicago in the fiction of Saul Bellow, examining the conflict between materialism and visionary idealism that lies at the heart of his work. Starting from the stereotypical characterization of Chicago as the home of brute matter, cynical pragmatism, and the mass production of commodities and physical things, the chapter traces Bellow’s autobiographical search for hidden spiritual truths, connecting this to the Jewish notion of being exiled in a foreign land, vestiges of the soul or the spirit disguised among the quotidian ugliness of industrial America. This conflict between things and ideas, matter and spirit, morality and “the hustle” of economic life, draws on both the conflicts of Bellow’s early life and the wider patterns of Jewish immigration and assimilation. Chicago appears in Bellow’s work as both an overwhelming physical presence and a metaphysical absence, linked to the emptiness of the prairies and haunted by the Jewish-Russian past of Bellow’s family. These contradictions and paradoxes are traced through a close reading of Bellow’s short fiction, as well as his major novels The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift.

This chapter traces the career of Henry Blake Fuller from the 1890s through the opening of the twentieth century. Fuller, a scion of one of the city’s first families and student of Chicago’s social networks and institutions, began by writing travel romances set in the Italian past. Turning quickly to literary realism, he depicted the rapidly expanding city of his birth, becoming arguably the first Midwestern writer to set his novels in the tumultuous environment of the growing metropolis. Fuller’s novels The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) and With the Procession (1895) were unvarnished critiques of Chicagoans’ materialist priorities, social ambitions, and unethical business practices, as well as the psychological and communal fractures caused by the accelerated pace of the city. Applying the structural principles of architecture to new methods of narration, Fuller’s novels of this period represent stylistic and conceptual differences between his practice of realism and that of his better-known contemporaries. The chapter also discusses Fuller’s long-standing interest in the Chicago art scene in books like Under the Skylights (1901), in which art and commerce struggle for primacy.

To Nelson Algren, the alleys, backstreets, and pool halls of Chicago constituted a frontier in their own right, with the Polish triangle of Wabanasia, Milwaukee, and Division forming the bulwark of a neighborhood peopled by those whose pulses could only be read in terms of the class, race, and ethnicity which defined their very existence. These were the multitude of Americans who are not recognized, who are largely excluded from American society, and Algren assumed the task of ensuring their visibility. Yet Algren’s insistence that the excluded were worth our attention, that their lives were important, came at a time when American criticism was moving away from the social realism of his work. By the 1950s, the propagation of monolithic values rooted in the premise of classless consumption formed a consensus that shifted the reality of class to a point where those who continued to address it were regarded at best as curiosities. Like the subject of his fiction, then, Algren’s work was excluded, moved to the periphery, as this important author fell victim to the myths of Cold War homogeneity.

This chapter studies the historical “Chicago fictions” that Theodore Dreiser published between 1900 and 1915, showing how they chart the city’s growth and development between the Fire of 1871 and the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter also outlines some of the literary techniques that Dreiser used in his attempts at capturing the city's dynamism, focusing on his novels’ indeterminate sense of historicity, their generic and stylistic heterogeneity, their emphasis on unsettled and changeable characters, and their simultaneously backward and forward-facing perspectives.

The little magazines Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and the Little Review were instrumental in promoting the Chicago Literary Renaissance and Chicago modernism. I investigate their central roles, reading these magazines as privileged sites of modern cultural production and reception as well as important cultural objects in their own right. First, I explain how these magazines relied on local benefactors and advertising to jostle for position among Chicago’s musical, visual, and theatrical arts, as well as within a periodical field that included such other established Chicago magazines as The Dial. I then consider the literary presence of Chicago in both magazines, incorporating digital humanities methodologies to locate Chicago-based contributors (including Carl Sandburg and Sherwood Anderson, along with lesser-known figures) and to identify the many poems and prose pieces associated with the city – highlighting individual literary achievements as well as shared images and tropes.

The future of Chicago literature will emerge from the city’s “literary infrastructure.” Just as the city’s literal infrastructures channel the movement of water and waste, electricity and gas, vehicles and people, literary institutions (publishers, bookstores, libraries, schools, museums, newspapers, performance venues) enable the flow of creative energies. From the late nineteenth century onwards, Chicago, as a new sort of industrial city, challenged writers with social and physical realities that seemed beyond (or below) conventional literary expression. Writers responded by innovating in style and genre, shifting the literary standards to represent how Chicago shaped, and was shaped by, its people. Many contemporary Chicago writers work across genres and in media as diverse as sociological scholarship and comic books; others write poetry and novels, while also functioning as part of the literary infrastructure as reviewers, publishers, and professors. Future Chicago literature will be written by native Chicagoans and newcomers alike, as they encounter the city, engage with its literary traditions, and write within (and create new) literary institutions.