Below you will find some of my articles about Illinois writers and writing. For links to my reviews of Illinois books, click here.

 

I made my living, mainly, writing for magazines and newspapers, but books are at the heart of what I do. Most of what I know about Illinois I learned from books. I write and edit books.  I review books for pay. My closest friends wrote or edited or taught about books, so that's what we talked about.

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Many of those books, inevitably, were about Illinois. I once attempted to compile an annotated list of books about Illinois I’ve found useful over the years. It proved impossible. (The best bits of that list appear as separate pieces among the links listed below.) Other writers have done better. The 1939 Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide listed “Fifty Books About Illinois,” most of which are still worth reading, although they are no longer the only fifty such books worth reading. Among the several newer lists available, I recommend the selection of Illinois books on Bibliovault, the scholarly online book repository, it being especially good on Chicago books. 

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The indefatigable John E. Hallwas was the editor of the nearly 50 excerpts collected in Illinois Literature: The Nineteenth Century (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986) which is just as useful for its introductions and book lists. More recently, Hallwas has compiled a Bicentennial Reading List for Illinois public libraries for the Illinois State Historical Society. Hallwas is a walking library of Illinois history and literature and has shared what he knows over a long career as teacher and writer. Prominent on Hallwas's list  are novels and poetry that illuminate the Illinois experience, a class of works that are largely a mystery to me. 

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A Reader’s Guide to Illinois Literature (Illinois Secretary of State, 1985, edited by Robert Bray), remains a useful though now dated collection of solid essays on nonfiction and fiction and poetry, with a separate look at women writers and annotated bibliographies. Also recommended is Bray’s own Rediscoveries: Literature and Place in Illinois (University of Illinois Press, 1991), and Writing Illinois: The Prairie, Lincoln, and Chicago by James Hurt (University of Illinois Press, 1991)

 

In Illinois Women Novelists in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography, Bernice E. Gallagher (University of Illinois Press, 1994) examines fifty-eight novels 58 novels written by 36 Illinois women, published from 1854 to 1893 that  Illinois Woman's Committee of Literature chose to include in a collection of work exhibited in the American section of the Women's Building during the 1983 world’s fair in Chicago; one reviewer concedes that the committee didn’t “unearthed any forgotten geniuses or neglected masterpieces,” but these works have some historical and social interest.

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Illinois writers figure prominently in The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers Project, 1935–43 (Little, Brown, 1972) by Jerre Mangione, the coordinating editor of the FWP in the late 1930s.

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In 2020, the folks who run the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute’s Renewing Illinois program at Southern Illinois University asked more than twenty-five prominent Illinoisans to respond to this question: If you were teaching an “Illinois 101” course to highly motivated undergraduates, what five books you would assign them to read? Here are some of the replies.

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Notable Illinois publishers 

 

Without publishers, writers would be carving their works into the bark of trees. Illinois has been home to some interesting publishing houses.

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Edward Hegeler was the master of the technical side of the zinc business; the machine he invented to smelt the metal is still used by the industry. His success allowed him to devote himself to public improvements of a very different kind. He founded a publishing house, Open Court Publishing, that produced magazines meant to serve as forums for scholars to debate religion, science, and philosophy—not uncommon preoccupations among late Victorian men of means. Later the firm ventured into book publishing under the direction of German scholar (and son-in-law) Paul Carus, author of a still-popular text, The Gospel of Buddha.

Grandfathers usually make fortunes that the grandchildren waste, but not so the children of the Carus-Hegeler line. In 1915 Edward Carus, grandson of Edward Hegeler, founded Carus Chemical Company in LaSalle, the world's largest manufacturer of one of those mysterious chemicals—in this case potassium permanganate—that is essential to advanced economies. Young Edward first produced the chemical while an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. Edward Carus’s son Blouke has kept his father’s company at the top of its field and reinvigorated the family publishing business; his Open Court Reading Program is described as a favorite among advocates of structured phonics-based instructional approaches and has been adopted by some of the nation’s larger school systems. Blouke‘s wife founded the Cricket group of children’s magazines, still going strong and still winning awards as the best of their kind in the U.S.

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Many a cultured youth returns home after college with the burning ambition to write poetry; James Decker came back with a plan to publish it. He was born in Prairie City, in the far northeast of McDonough County. The Decker Press was run out of the back of his grandfather's drug store; Decker set the type and ran the press, with the help of his sister Dorothy. The press won attention when Edgar Lee Masters—then still a notable name, if no longer a notable poet—gave Decker his Illinois Poems (1941) and Along the Illinois (1942) to publish.

More than 50 volumes followed over the next five years (Decker would put out more than 100 in all), most in limited runs. For a time the Decker Press was the largest house in the U.S. devoted exclusively to publishing poetry. Some of the keenest poetic talents of the era sought out Decker, including David Ignatow, Kenneth Patchen, and Kenneth Rexroth. To poets of national stature, Decker Press was, briefly, as familiar a name as that of the far more famous Poetry magazine in Chicago—a rare instance of an Illinois small town making a name for itself as more than a place where artists used to live.

 
Sadly, the under-capitalized Decker could barely afford to print books, much less market them, and in any event the audience for poetry was only slightly larger then than now. Financial troubles led to the firm being sold in 1947. It continued to operate until 1950. That was when Dorothy Decker, unhinged by an unrequited love, shot one of the owners, then herself—not, perhaps, an encouraging model for the many Illinois small presses that would follow it.

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Mention also should be made of the many Illinois books that would have languished unpublished had it not been for  the yeoman work done by Illinois’s larger university presses in bringing to the public works presumably of durable interest that more commercial houses disdain. The Prairie State Books series published by the University of Illinois Press, for example, includes a wide range of notable titles with helpful introductions. Southern Illinois University Press’s Shawnee Classics series meets the same standard with works of relevance to SIU’s home region. The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with important interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the now-standard one-volume history of the state and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War.  And any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles from the University of Chicago Press about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to Vivian Maier.

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Note: Some of the books mentioned in these pages  can be purchased from the nonprofit Bookshop.org via the links here provided. Part of the profit from each sale goes into a fund to support independent bookstores, and part goes into my empty pocket. You should know that.

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