Skip to main content

Chicago: City on the Make

Sixtieth Anniversary Edition

With an Introduction by Studs Terkel and Notes by David Schmittgens and Bill Savage.

“Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren’s writing that “you should not read it if you cannot take a punch.” The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its “nobodies nobody knows”: the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets.

Upon its original publication in 1951, Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people, one that boldly defied City Hall’s business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city’s breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence.

The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, “the best book about Chicago.”


152 pages | 10 halftones | 5 1/2 x 8 | © 2011

Chicago and Illinois

Travel and Tourism: Travel Writing and Guides

Table of Contents

Introduction by Studs Terkel
1. The hustlers
2. Are you a Christian?
3. The silver-colored yesterday
4. Love is for barflies
5. Bright faces of tomorrow
6. No more giants
7. Nobody knows where O’Connor went
Afterword
Notes
Acknowledgments
Publishing History
Bibliography

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press