Bibliography
The Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature is the largest African-American history and literature collection in the Midwest, and the best place to study the Black Chicago Renaissance.
This bibliography is a starting point of predominantly secondary sources. Not included are the complete works of Chicago writers and artists, including diaries and correspondence.
---
Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House. 1910. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Allen, James Sloan. The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Baldwin, Davarian. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
---. “‘Midnight was Like the Day’: Strolling Through Archibald Motley’s Bronzeville.” Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist. Edited by Richard J. Powell. Durham: Durham University Press, 2014.
---. “Renaissance Noir.” Centennial: A History of the Renaissance Society, 1915-2015. Chicago: The Renaissance Society, 2015.
Bone, Robert and Richard Courage. The Muse in Bronzeville. Rutgers University Press, 2011.
Cayton, Horace, and St. Clair Drake. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945.
Cozzolino, Robert. Art in Chicago: Resisting Regionalism, Transforming Modernism. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2007.
---, and Maggie Taft, eds. From the Fire to Now: A History of Chicago Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1991.
Dolinar, Brian, ed. The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
Duffey, Bernard. The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State College Press, 1956.
Dyja, Thomas. The Third Coast. New York, Penguin, 2013.
Fleissner, Jennifer. Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Green, Adam. Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-55. University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Greenhouse, Wendy, and Susan Weininger. Chicago Painting 1895 to 1945: The Bridges Collection. Springfield: University of Illinois Press and Illinois State Museum, 2004.
Grossman, James, R., Ann Durkin Keating, Janice Reiff, eds., Michael P. Conzen, cartographic ed. The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Heap, Chad. Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Harris, Neil, ed. The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
---. “Memory and the White City” in Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893. Eds. Neil Harris, Wim De Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert W. Rydell. Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993.
Hine, Darlene Clark, and John McCluskey Jr. Eds. The Black Chicago Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.
Hricko, Mary. The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.
Jackson, Lawrence. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Kennedy, Elizabeth, ed. Chicago Modern, 1893-1945: Pursuit of the New. Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Terra Foundation, 2004.
Knupfer, Anne Meis. The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism. University of Illinois Press, 2006.
Meyerowitz, Joanne J. Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Miller,Wayne. Chicago’s South Side, 1946-1948. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Morgan, Stacy. Re-Thinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930-53. University of Georgia Press, 2004.
Mullen, Bill V. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935- 46. University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Oehler, Sarah Kelly. They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration, 1910-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2013.
Olson, Liesl, Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
---. “Carl Sandburg’s Chicago: Stormy, Husky, Brawling at 100,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 10, 2016.
---. “Across Stark Lines.” Centennial: A History of the Renaissance Society, 1915-2015. Chicago: The Renaissance Society, 2015.
---. “Seeing Eldzier Cortor.” Chicago Review 59.04/60.1 (May 2016), 119-142.
Pierce, Bessie Louis, ed. As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors, 1673-1933. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933.
Prince, Sue Anne, ed. The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Schlabach, Elizabeth Schroeder. Along the Streets of Bronzeville: Black Chicago’s Literary Landscape. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
Schultz, Rima Lunin, Adele Hast, eds. Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Smith, Carl. Chicago and the American Literary Imagination 1880-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
---. The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Spears, Timothy B. Chicago Dreaming: Midwesterners and the City, 1871-1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Stewart, Jacqueline. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Tracy, Steven C., ed. Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Weininger, Susan S. “Modernism and Chicago Art: 1910-1940” in The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940, ed. Sue Anne Prince. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990.
Whalen, Mark. Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
Williams, Ellen. Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First 10 Years of Poetry, 1912-1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Wixon, Douglas. Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1990. Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 1994.
Zorbaugh, Warren. The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929.
