". . . Noe . . . manages to foreground the social construction of the subject she studies, and consequently the values of those who contribute to our understanding of that subject. . . ."CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES

The Chicago Literary Experience is a concise literary history of the city of Chicago. Taking as its thematic starting point the city's famous World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the book provides an account of the city's rapid and in many ways unprecedented development from trading post to metropolis, and examines the many literary responses to this new urban environment. By contextualizing literature written about the city in these formative years, the book shows not only how the city influenced its writers, but also how these writers struggled to transform their urban environment into literary forms. Covering such aspect as the emergence of the novel of the businessman as cultural hero, the humorous newspaper columns of the late nineteenth century, and the Depression-era revitalization of Chicago literature from its ethnic neighborhoods, the book moves beyond the obvious "classics" and rediscovers a vibrant literary tradition that restores almost-forgotten writers such as Eugene Field and Floyd Dell to their place in American literary history. Given the historical approach and the breadth of material covered, the book will be valuable to anyone wanting to understand how American literature in this defining period moved from the farm to the city-and what happened to it once it had arrived. Authors discussed include Jane Addams, George Ade, Nelson Algren, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Willa Cather, Floyd Dell, Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Eugene Field, Henry B. Fuller, Hamlin Garland, Robert Herrick, Jack London, Frank Norris, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair and Richard Wright. Frederik Byrn Køhlert is a doctoral student at the University of Montreal. He has an MA in English from the University of Oregon and an MA in English and Scandinavian Literature from the University of Aarhus, Denmark.

The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature is a comprehensive resource that demonstrates the Midwest's continuing cultural vitality and the stature and distinctiveness of its literature.