For several glorious years, Chicago served as the source of an American literary renaissance that dwarfed similar national movements with its innovativeness and use of quintessentially American themes. Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, and Edgar Lee Masters busied themselves with creating a... [more]
For several glorious years, Chicago served as the source of an American literary renaissance that dwarfed similar national movements with its innovativeness and use of quintessentially American themes. Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, and Edgar Lee Masters busied themselves with creating a universal theater from Midwestern subjects, scenes, and values. Influenced by earthy compatriots Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser, these playwrights, distrustful of highfalutin urban angst, dressed their dramas down to a readily accessible human scale. A down-home poetics of place and a vernacular rhythm quietly bespoke their grassroots revolt against established literary conventions. Master Spoon River Anthology (1919) and Hecht's 'The Front Page' (1928) exemplify the Chicago Group's penchant for terse simplicity, underplayed dramatic tension, and natural dialogue. The influence of their characters' unvarnished honesty and workaday, plain-spoken voices has been far-reaching, coloring Ernest Hemingway's minimalist prose, and patterning the loquacious, rural ramblings of William Faulker's work.
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