The Chicagoan

“It gleams. It glitters. It practically shouts, ‘Sophistication!’ except for the fact that the truly sophisticated never shout. A silky murmur will do. It was called The Chicagoan, and from 1926 to 1935 . . . it graced the coffee tables and guided the cultural choices of the city’s elite. It was a magazine, but it was more than that, too: It was a mindset. An attitude. A lofty perspective on the passing show. Thanks to the archival detective work of Neil Harris, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, we can glide our way back to an era when elegance mattered—not only in dress and deportment, but also in sentence and image. In The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age . . . a hefty, gorgeous hunk of a book that reproduces one entire issue as well as 149 covers and many articles, a vanished era returns. It comes back in all of its fussy glory, its daffy humor, its gentle insistence that even a city best known for gangsters and stockyards could yearn for beauty and glamour.—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

“A nine-year wonder. . . . As demonstrated by this elegant collection of covers, illustrations, and stories from the Chicagoan, in its heyday Chicago was the most stylish, exciting and quintessentially American of all the cities that encircle the United States. The Chicagoan lasted only nine years, but they were well chosen, from 1926 to 1935, straddling prohibition, the depression and the jazz age. Although deliberately aping the New Yorker, founded a year earlier, its cover design was entirely its own, a cocktail of art-deco design, slabby poster colours and mordant wit. The sinuous illustrations cascading across the inside pages made it visually far superior to the original . . . . Perhaps it was too beautiful to survive.”

“Somehow this vibrant magazine was completely forgotten until a few years ago, when the distinguished cultural historian Neil Harris came upon a set of the magazine’s run in the library of the University of Chicago. It has now been brought back into print, if not to life, by the University of Chicago Press. What a marvelous job they have done! This is a book you will want to own, a coffee-table book nicer and better than most coffee tables. The University of Chicago Press has swung for the fences, producing the book to the highest standards—a nearly 400-page oversize volume, designed with care and attentiveness, to period detail and featuring loads of full-color images. It’s a pleasure to see the ball sail into the bleachers. . . .Thanks to Neil Harris’s serendipitous discovery and the University of Chicago Press’s superb effort, The Chicagoan takes its rightful place on the top shelf.”

“Reading the dusty old mag in this beautiful new book made us nostalgic for an urban culture that we never got to experience. The Chicagoan was civically engaged in a way publications nowadays rarely are. No compunction exists about taking shots at politicians, making hay about the naming of the Art Institute lions, or moaning about the difficulty of hailing a cab on Michigan Avenue. Though we hardly knew ye, Chicagoan, you’re suddenly sorely missed.”

“A testament to serendipity. . . . Harris does a wonderful job of situating the magazine in the urban cacophony of 1920s Chicago, a city at the height of its power.”

“The product of [Neil] Harris’ years of thorough and thoughtful research, now fashioned into a fantastically hefty volume, a treasure-trove of our city’s cultural history. . . . There were no stars at The Chicagoan. The Second City’s scrappy reputation held firm with the magazine’s hodgepodge of artists, journalists and academics who filled its pages twice a month (once a month in later years). They remain largely unknown, to this day, though Harris gives them their due, both in his eloquent historical analysis and in an appendix at the end of the book.”

“Entrepreneurs and journalists dreaming of the next great Chicago magazine will find the Chicagoan compelling, the writing interesting, the mere fact of its existence perhaps providing succor.”

“Social and cultural scholars will find [The Chicagoan] a joy, but this primarily pictorial book, with its witty textual nuggets and stylized Art Deco illustrations, will appeal to a nonacademic audience as well. . . . Highly recommended [for] all library collections.”