To Find Out More

The author recommends Bessie L. Pierce’s three-volume A History of Chicago , which is more than most people want to read straight through, but it is useful for looking up any aspect of the subject. Edward Wagenknecht’s Chicago (1964) is good reading, as is the long section on Chicago in the 1939 Federal Writers’ Project guide to the state of Illinois. Lost Chicago (1975), by David Lowe, is a mixture of old photographs and anecdotal text that conveys a real sense of the city. And don’t overlook Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Titan , whose hero’s career is closely based on that of Charles Tyson Yerkes and gives a tangy sense of what it must have felt like to be making big money in the confident, disheveled, splendid Chicago of the late nineteenth century.