Langston Hughes’s association with Chicago as a nexus for modernism was clearly marked in 1926, when he published four poems in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a leading journal for avant-garde poetry in the English-speaking world. This analysis considers how geocultural contexts in Chicago figured in the development of Hughes’s engagements with modernism. Examining Hughes’s jazz and blues poetry of the 1920s in light of his response to formal innovations by Chicago Renaissance poets such as Carl Sandburg as well as “high” modernists such as T. S. Eliot, I also explore how his critical engagement with Ezra Pound’s imagist poetics was shaped by the prior examples of Sandburg and Jean Toomer, and conclude with a discussion of how Hughes’s literary collaboration with Chicago luminaries such as Richard Wright and his mentorship of Gwendolyn Brooks played an important role in the creative flowering of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

This chapter examines the legacy of the Chicago Renaissance (1910–25) by focusing on the relationship between writers Sherwood Anderson and Floyd Dell. The chapter pays special attention to Dell’s late-life evaluation of Anderson – Anderson died in 1941, while Dell lived until 1969 – and draws extensively from Dell’s papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago, which underscore his hostility toward literary modernism as well as his associated dislike of Anderson. Although in the 1910s and 1920s, Dell was known as a bohemian writer/editor and leftist political figure, in later years, he became more conservative and tended to stress his allegiance to more traditional literary forms – in particular, realism – and to downplay his championship of the “new.” This tension between realism and modernism is evident in Dell’s ambivalent response to Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Anderson’s modernist-oriented portrayal of life in a small, Ohio town. The article also shows how these tensions may be seen in Chicago literature written after the Renaissance and notes that realism remained the dominant mode of representation during the 1930s and 1940s.

This chapter makes the case that the Little Theatre movement in the United States was a unique outgrowth of the Chicago Renaissance’s diversity, values, and networks. The chapter provides a list of Little Theatre characteristics – including artistic exchange, philanthropy, ensemble theater practice, trends in dramatic literature, and development in theater design – evident in Mary Reynolds Aldis’s work with her Lake Forest Players between 1911 and 1916. By putting the Lake Forest Players in context with Laura Dainty Pelham’s Hull-House Players and Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg’s Chicago Little Theatre, the chapter makes clear both how the city’s artistic boom helped create the Little Theatre movement and how the practices that these early Little Theatres in Chicago developed became standard for contemporary non-profit theatre in Chicago and in the United States.