Saul Bellow must be considered as the first winner. He too spoke for a different time, a new voice from the heart of America.

Gwendolyn Brooks tells of both a woman’s experience in Chicago, and the huge history of the post-Civil War and continuing black experience here. Both stories are important and underrepresented in all of our lists. She demands serious consideration.

John Callaway, admittedly a personal friend, devoted his life to the arts and politics, and professionally worked to the end of his life on enlightening Chicago on contributions to the arts nationally. His interviews and explorations of literature in his Chicago Tonight series were thoughtful and insightful and elevated the art of interview itself. He left behind him an oeuvre of documentaries that captures important history, particularly Chicago history. Although I realize that neither John Callaway or Mike Royko will displace a Nobel Laureate, Nobel nominee, or a Pulitzer Prize winner as the first winner of the Chicago Hall of Fame, I think both deserve a place of honor on the roster at some point.

Theodore Dreiser, originally from Indiana, fought his way out of poverty through newspaper reporting, much like his contemporary Mark Twain, who also had been born near Chicago (across the Mississippi from Illinois). Both men began writing fiction in a spare, reportorial style that used much vernacular, and eschewed the elevated and more British-flavored East Coast writing of the time. Thus both men led the attack on literature of Modernism, using urban naturalism and speech, with attacks on the genteel tradition with its social inequality, materialism and cruelties, similar in content if not style to Joyce, Freud, Sinclair Lewis and Faulkner. Dreiser also foreshadowed the 20th Century Women’s Liberation when he wrote about the devastating effect of the late 19th Century morality on young women, particularly his Hardy-style Midwestern heroines who had been led astray by wealthy older men, then left to deliver children as unwed mothers, a stigma then that ruined lives. His early stream-of-conscious writing in an American vernacular, and attack on American culture and materialism, became an early example of a true American voice. His work, his voice, his subjects, all were inextricably Midwestern and his stories immediately call to mind Chicago or its environs.

Ernest Hemingway, very like Mark Twain but in a later era, spoke out in an authentic, middle-American voice that changed the way we all read and wrote. He was born in the suburbs of Chicago, spent summers in Michigan, and became known for his life as an ex-pat after World War I. He broke with the profuse and unrestrained 19th C novels of manners, motivated as much by his post-war disillusionment, as his corollary rejection of pretension and the by-then anachronistic writing styles. His reporting from the Spanish Revolution for the Toronto Star molded a deadline reporter’s precision and integrity to the sentence; his brevity brought clarity and sensuality to images. His first rules, from the first editor at the Toronto Star were: avoid adjectives, especially those like splendid, gorgeous, grand, and magnificent. Yet his characters, particularly his women, use all those adjectives and this sets up a way of showing them so that you feel their innocence--they’re out of that loop. He expressed enormous excitement in “discovering how English leads to simplicity through brevity. He became part of the Gertrude Stein/Ezra Pound circle in Paris, and with them rejected archaic writing, championed the new for the new, the polar opposite of Proust in his cork-lined room. Hemingway spoke for a whole generation of disillusionment—a war that made a mess—WWI settled very little, as we all know now—, euphoria in the 20s, and then—of course, The Depression. He brought a sense of, Enough with the abstract ideas. The world was ready for a writer who would give primacy to things. Bob Butler has a current essay on Hemingway’s sensuality, and how the life of the senses was primary for him. He undoubtedly took pleasure in confounding expectations about how a writer should behave. Radical for then, his own code read: “The great thing is to last, and get your work done, and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damn much after.” And what he knew documented the decades of the "Lost Generation," the many young Americans veterans who left their native country, bitter over war and seeking adventure. Hemingway became a celebrity Hero, an example for post-WWI and II veterans who, came home and began to pattern their writing lives after him. WWI was called ‘the war to end all wars’ —hard to remember that now—and Hemingway created male heroes with a ‘live for today’ philosophy. That generation of—mostly men—gravitated to a life of hard drinking, easy loving and courting danger, saw it as the ‘masculine’ way to confront, and to go to ground with any menace—a test of manhood. Meanwhile, he continued to acquire his expertise through participation as well as of observation. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, Time magazine reported the news under Heroes not Books and went on to describe the author as "a globe-trotting expert on bullfights, booze, women, wars, big game hunting, deep sea fishing, and courage." Hard not to consider his work in light of its dissolute ending. Some suggest his love of poetry is underestimated, as is his soft side, which existed. Frequently his women characters emerged as far more lovable than any of the men. But much of his work can be read as, and has the cadence of, poetry. Ironically critics write about fear in Hemingway’s nature: witness his early and dark Nick Adams stories, anonymous danger coming from nowhere. He would meet fear head-on, mud-wrestling if necessary. In a sense this never ended—think of The Old Man and The Sea. His time as ex-pat also seems more a classic neighborhood boy seeking adventure rather than rejecting America.

Carl Sandburg is hard to deny as a first winner of this award. His work was groundbreaking, his style unique, and his life experience on the Chicago stage is a watermark in history. A multi-media dynamo, he refracted so much of Chicago history through the clarity of his vision and his “City of Big Shoulders” has almost (not quite) pushed out Al Capone as the first-to-mind cliché about Chicago, (meant as a compliment this time). Chicago, during an industrializing century in American history, was indeed the brawn of the nation, the hub of all transportation. My elderly father said about an early Chicago he actually could remember, that there were always jobs here. Less poetic, my father, but I think Sandburg and he appreciated the same strength of character about the city. Only Nelson Algren competes, in my mind, as being quintessentially Chicago, but I think Sandburg transcends both Algren and Bellow for the generosity of his instincts about the town’s core character, willpower, embracing of immigrants, and ability to adapt to what worked.