Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated Book

This is one of the best things I've ever happened upon--Algren's name is legendary, but I've mostly overlooked him. Too much of this book is too much good to comment on. I don't really know where to begin. As a knee-jerk lefty, there's a lot of Algren that's easy to agree with: the brokers and hustlers reward themselves of other's efforts; there's blood on the streets; you'll live your whole life in the shadows of towers; no one will remember your efforts unless you've stolen them of someone else's labor. On top of that, there's a soft spot for artists and poets run through the whole thing. With that sort of subject, written in a muscular, symbolist measure, I can't help but be a fan. Whether or not that's a book worth the reading, I couldn't say. For me, it's an exemplary American effort, over and beyond the facile complaints of the upper-middleclass so haunts our fiction--here the sweat and tears of Dreiser, Masters, Sandburg, find comment and expansion. Chicago's no sweet home, but the most terrible and American of places, scourged by power, reinvented, rootless--resting place of Haymarket and the ten thousand discouraged.