A lover of Chicago books launches the wiki site Chicago Literary Archive. Fellow fans welcome.
Adam Morgan, who probably loves Chicago literature more than you do, grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Greenville, South Carolina. An hour north of him, Thomas Wolfe was once infamously author non grata, having thinly disguised his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina for “Look Homeward, Angel”; not to mention, Zelda Fitzgerald died in a hospital fire there while being institutionalized. But in Morgan’s own hometown? Other being the birthplace of Dorothy Allison (“Bastard Out of Carolina”), there was no real literary pedigree. So when he moved to Chicago in 2008, to get an M.F.A. from Roosevelt University, he fell hopelessly in love with the books scene. And ever since then, you might argue, no one has been a bigger booster.
Morgan founded Chicago Review of Books, taught at StoryStudio in Ravenswood, promoted local authors and their books tirelessly on social media; he even reissued the early Chicago novel “The Cliff-Dwellers,” Henry Blake Fuller’s 1893 portrait of the city coalescing.
“I am not the world’s foremost scholar of Chicago literature,” he said with a laugh, by phone from his new home (back in South Carolina). “But I guess it’s fair to say I am definitely its biggest fan.”
No doubt: On Wednesday he unveiled his latest plan to bolster Chicago literature, the Chicago Literary Archive, described as an “independent, open-source research guide to Chicago’s literary, printing and publishing history from 1837 to today,” a kind of dedicated one-stop Chi-lit Wikipedia, to be written, edited and shaped by anyone (pending Morgan’s approval) also in love with Chicago books. Right now the website (chicagoliteraryarchive.org) is nascent and sparse — he’s only just beginning to gather contributions — but Morgan, 35, sees it as a rallying point.
What follows is an edited version of a longer conversation.
Q: OK, so broadly, why do this?
A: I think there are maybe only one or two other cities in this country that have been written about more than Chicago, and that’s New York, of course, and probably Los Angeles. I am drawn to a strong sense of place, and when I first came to Chicago it wasn’t the New York I probably imagined. So in a way I went about making it more special by reading about it. I found my fascination with Chicago through its literature, in a way. Like Los Angeles, it was kind of nothing and nowhere when writers first moved in, so a lot of them did not really climb the usual social rungs to get where they finally landed. But also, on a practical level, I thought about an archive, because I collect books on Chicago and from Chicago authors and I have done a lot of research on its literature, and while everyone knows about Gwendolyn Brooks and Studs Terkel and Saul Bellow, there are hundreds of authors and books we should know more. But a lot of what was published here before World War II has fallen out of print. You can’t even find a lot of information on lot of what was published in Chicago before then. So why not ask others? My knowledge is incomplete. By starting a website I hoped that scholars and readers might fill in the large gaps.
Q: I smell that old Chicago defensiveness about New York.
A: I guess that’s inevitable. I adore New York, I won’t antagonize New York —
Q: No, no, go ahead.
A: I’m sure that’s what you want! Look, the publishing industry has been based In New York for more than a century, New York writers and literary movements are far immortalized more than writers and movements in Chicago. For instance, think of the Chicago Black Renaissance in Bronzeville, which is not studied nearly as much as the Harlem Renaissance. And yet by having some centralized, easily searchable history, maybe you can bring analysis of these things back into the conversation. I also want to include geography in this.
Q: You have “Places” as a main category, alongside “Books” and “People.”
A: Books are a byproduct of place, so I wanted to be able to catalog where Gwendolyn Brooks was living when she wrote “Annie Allen,” or where Nelson Algren drank. I want to immortalize the lost bookstores of Chicago. All of that enriches a sense of place. I grouped the history into four movements, roughly the scene of the 1890s that was around the World’s Fair, the modernists of the 1910s clustered at the Fine Arts Building, the Chicago Black Renaissance and the post-war 1950s to the 2000s — though personally, I’d argue there is a literary renaissance going on now, partly driven by the explosion of independent book stores.
Q: Running a kind of wiki, are you prepared for inevitable open-sourced controversies?
A: Actually, I have already run into one — within an hour of launching the site! Like, just before you called. The question was: What counts as “Chicago” in this archive? Someone founded a literary magazine in DeKalb. Does DeKalb count in a Chicago literary scene? I don’t know. It’s early. I still need guidelines. But every wiki runs into one thing — who is watching the watchers?
