The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age
I've just gotten a review copy of my own and it's even better than I'd hoped. The print quality is spectacular, reproducing cleaned-up pages from the archives of The Chicagoan at full size, in the manner of the gigantic Little Nemo book that came out a couple years ago. I had to physically restrain myself from slicing out the 80 pages' worth of color plates of the covers and sending them to the framers.
Chicago is one of the loveliest, most livable cities I've ever visited (even in the winter! I'm a Torontonian, so I'm not scared of a little snow and wind) and the vivid historical picture conjured up by this volume is pure loveliness to me.
The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age on Amazon, The Chicagoan at Chicago Press, Excerpted pages PDF
While browsing the stacks of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago some years ago, noted historian Neil Harris made a surprising discovery: a group of nine plainly bound volumes whose unassuming spines bore the name the Chicagoan. Pulling one down and leafing through its pages, Harris was startled to find it brimming with striking covers, fanciful art, witty cartoons, profiles of local personalities, and a whole range of incisive articles. He quickly realized that he had stumbled upon a Chicago counterpart to the New Yorker that mysteriously had slipped through the cracks of history and memory.Here Harris brings this lost magazine of the Jazz Age back to life. In its own words, the Chicagoan claimed to represent “a cultural, civilized, and vibrant” city “which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Elysees.” Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the 1925 appearance of the New Yorker, it sought passionately to redeem the Windy City’s unhappy reputation for organized crime, political mayhem, and industrial squalor by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest. Harris’s substantial introductory essay here sets the stage, exploring the ambitions, tastes, and prejudices of Chicagoans during the 1920s and 30s. The author then lets the Chicagoan speak for itself in lavish full-color segments that reproduce its many elements: from covers, cartoons, and editorials to reviews, features—and even one issue reprinted in its entirety.
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Amazing art was published in magazines. In the 1920's, SHADOWLAND had incredible covers and interesting interior pages, but there were dozens more. Do a search on "magazine art" or "magazine cover art" and you'll be amazed what you find.
--magscanner
No comment on the fiction therein. What's it like?
Some of the best writers of the Jazz Age -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe -- never wrote a single story for The New Yorker. It wasn't the be-all end-all that its reputation of recent decades seem to imply. That reputation exists, of course, because no professional publications run fiction anymore -- from Cosmo to Vogue, Esquire to the Saturday Evening Post, fiction's gone. No fiction in the new web pubs, either -- not in Salon or Gawker, not in the Huffington Post or bOING bOING, not linked by Drudge, nowhere in the linkroll of Arts & Letters Daily, not to be found in the mainstream Web at all. No one's buying it. But you can make good money as a writer today by coming up with blog entries ...
It's just a sad mark of the times -- fiction used to be mainstream and now it's either unknown and truly, truly underground (you've never heard of them or read them, but they're out there, smart as hell & struggling) or it's an academic exercise (the literary journals of the universities, with short stories and poems written by the profs). No big-time outlets for fiction now, that everybody reads, and that sucks -- it makes our civilization that much dumber, dimmer, less magical and grand. It's frustrating, like, why can't we do it?
I say, "Yes we can!"
Any great publishing genius care to resurrect The Chicagoan on the Web? Be a new voice of American life in the beginnings of a new century? You've got a first-class author of short mainstream fiction standing by.
The University of Chicago Press also has a gallery of covers from The Chicagoan.