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Chicago literature is writing, primarily by writers born or living in Chicago, that reflects the culture of the city. ==Themes and movements== James Atlas, in his biography of Chicago writer Saul Bellow, suggests that "the city's reputation for nurturing literary and intellectual talent can be traced to the same geographical centrality that made it a great industrial power."〔Atlas, James. ''Bellow''. New York: Random House, 2000. 6.〕 When Chicago was incorporated in 1837, it was a frontier outpost with about 4,000 people. The population rose rapidly to approximately 100,000 in 1860. By 1890, the city had over 1 million people.〔Nugent, Walter. ''Encyclopedia of Chicago'', "(Demography )."〕 Chicago's dynamic growth, as well as the manufacturing, economics, and politics that fueled this growth, can be seen in the works of writers like Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, and Edna Ferber. Due to these rapid changes, Chicago writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced the challenge of how to depict this potentially disorienting new urban reality. Narrative fiction of that time, much of it in the style of "high-flown romance" and "genteel realism", needed a new approach to describe Chicago's social, political, and economic conditions.〔Savage, Bill. (Encyclopedia of Chicago, "Fiction." )〕 Chicagoans worked hard to create a literary tradition that would stand the test of time,〔Spears, Timothy B. (Encyclopedia of Chicago, "Literary Cultures." )〕 and create a "city of feeling" out of concrete, steel, vast lake, and open prairie.〔Rotella, Carlo. (Encyclopedia of Chicago, "Literary Images of Chicago" )〕 Among the new techniques and styles embraced by Chicago writers were "naturalism," "imagism," and "free verse." Themes often centered on an exciting but dirty urbanism, as well as the quaint but dark and sometimes stultifying small town. Chicago's early twentieth-century writers and publishers were seen as producing innovative work that broke with the literary traditions of Europe and the Eastern United States. In 1920, the critic H.L. Mencken wrote in a London magazine, the ''Nation,'' that Chicago was the "Literary Capital of the United States." Expressing the attitude that Chicago writers were creating a distinctive, new, and far from genteel literary idiom, he wrote, "Find a writer who is indubitably an American in every pulse-beat, snort, and adenoid, an American who has something new and peculiarly American to say and who says it in an unmistakable American way, and nine times out of ten you will find that he has some sort of connection with the gargantuan and inordinate abattoir by Lake Michigan."〔Mencken, Henry L. "(The Literary Capital of the United States )." ''HathiTrust'' Retrieved 5 Feb 2015.〕 While Chicago produced much realist and naturalist fiction,〔Savage, Bill. ''Encyclopedia of Chicago,'' "(Fiction )."〕 its literary institutions also played a crucial role in promoting international modernism. The avant-garde ''Little Review'' (founded 1914 by Margaret Anderson) began in Chicago, though it later moved elsewhere. The ''Little Review'' provided an important platform for experimental literature, famously serializing James Joyce's novel ''Ulysses'' until the magazine was forced to discontinue the novel due to obscenity charges.〔(The Modernist Journals Project ) (searchable database). Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing.〕 Similarly, the publication that became ''Poetry'' magazine (founded 1912 by Harriet Monroe) was instrumental in launching the Imagist and Objectivist poetic movements. T. S. Eliot's first professionally published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," appeared in ''Poetry''. Contributors have included Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg, among others. The magazine also discovered such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill, and John Ashbery.〔Goodyear, Dana, ("The Moneyed Muse: What can two hundred million dollars do for poetry?" ), article, ''The New Yorker'', February 19 and February 26 double issue, 2007〕 ''Poetry'' and the ''Little Review'' were "daring" in their editorial championship of the modernist movement. Later editors also made substantial contributions in poetry, as did Chicago's university and performance venues.〔Starkey, David and Bill Savage (Encyclopedia of Chicago, "Poetry" )〕 According to Bill Savage in ''The Encyclopedia of Chicago'', today's Chicago writers are still interested in the same social themes and urban landscapes that compelled earlier Chicago writers: "the fundamental dilemmas presented by city life in general and by the specifics of Chicago's urban spaces, history, and relentless change."〔Savage, Bill. ''The Encyclopedia of Chicago'', (Fiction ).〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Chicago literature」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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