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December062008

The Chicagoan: "No Obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Elysees"

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Jonathan Taylor writes:

I only just happened on this New York Times Book Review piece from a couple weeks ago, about The Chicagoan, a short-lived magazine launched in 1926 in ardent imitation of The New Yorker. (The article is by Matt Weiland, late of that Chicago institution The Baffler--or still of it? What is up with The Baffler, anyway?)

The University of Chicago Press is putting out a hefty coffee table book about the magazine, which was seemingly forgotten until some issues were unearthed by historian Neil Harris at the university's Regenstein Library. Harris notes that The Chicagoan was "an effort to counter the city's negative reputation" as "a place of raw commerce and crime--brawny, philistine, vulgar, and violent."

A gallery of Deco-mad covers and other images, PDFs from the book, including a lot more interior pages of the mag, and an interview with Harris, are at the publisher's site. It's all just too much to digest here. The attractions are clear: Be off, and be back to discuss!

Comments

Thanks for pointing this out, Jonathan. There was a spread on this in the U of C alumni magazine that I received a few weeks back - my eye was arrested by the images, but alas, I failed to read it.

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