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Slideshow Review: THE CHICAGOAN: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age
Neil Harris, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, was flipping through “a group of plainly bound volumes” when he stumbled upon the long-lost arts magazine The Chicagoan. Those volumes, one of only two substantially complete sets known to exist, formed the contents of this spectacular coffee table book, released by the University of Chicago Press. It was, as Harris recalls, “a classic scholarly moment: a serendipitous encounter in a library.”
Launched a year after Harold Ross’ The New Yorker (and borrowing more than just its three-column grid and idiosyncratic illustrated cover concept) The Chicagoan served as a cultural barometer for the Windy City for almost eight years. Serving up its own brand of high-minded journalism, panache and gusto, The Chicagoan documented the Midwest of the Twenties and early Thirties like no other local publication of its day. Although the magazine suffered from an identity crisis in its first couple of years — burning through a handful of editors in the first few issues alone — it utilized the city’s abundant resources, artists and critics to fill its pages with profiles, articles, editorials, reviews, photography and cartoons.
Ben Hecht, perhaps the city’s most famous journalist, having left for a new life in New York (and later on, Hollywood), once lamented that Chicago “was a town you could play in; a town where you could stay yourself and where the hoots of the critics couldn’t frighten your style or drain your soul.” This wonderful 400-page oversized, hardcover volume flawlessly resurrects this bygone era of Midwest history, as well as the artistic spirit for which Hecht grew nostalgic later in life, with true Jazz Age grandeur.
— J.C. Gabel
Illustration by Various
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