“Yet once you’ve come to be a part of this particular patch you’ll never love another”—Algren, Chicago: City on the Make
“[Chicago]…is the carny freak show’s two-headed boy, one noggin Neanderthal, the other noble-browed”—Studs Terkel in an intro to Chicago: City on the Make
The night I finished rereading Algren’s love-hate prose poem Chicago: City on the Make, there was a double homicide drive-by across the street from our home on the 4800 block of North Troy St. The same block where Algren grew up. Within three weeks we packed up and moved to the suburbs. Every day when I leave the city, its glory and depravity at my back, I feel like I’m being deprived, like something is missing from that place in the body that has no name, that place that knows home. Algren was rejected by the place that once nurtured him and this sentiment, of loving it but being estranged from it, summarizes not just my relationship with Chicago but with the writers I identify as representing Algren’s “Chicago Palatinate.” Those who loved their broken-nosed bitch, even after the divorce.
Chicago. Algren put it best: “Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. Yet knowing it can never love you.”
Nelson Algren. Obviously.

Born in Ohio, the disrespected mentor of Faulkner and Hemingway, came to Chicago, left, then came back, then lived all over, from New Orleans to Virginia. Anderson’s decade or so in Chicago is less important than Midwestern literature—if there is such a thing—represented by Winesburg, Ohio.

The first third of The Adventures of Augie March, with its hundreds of characters in half as many pages, is a grotesquerie of the character of Chicago.

Boss. Enough said.

Went from selling hot dogs at the ballparks to illustrating for Playboy, then he too left Chicago, lived everywhere and died in Key West.

Ended up in Chicago as a headstrong young man enchanted by the city; disenfranchised by Chicago racism and politics, specifically the Communist Party, he moves to NYC then becomes an expat because of McCarthyism. Who is Bigger Thomas if not the city of Chicago?