This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout. The results of each contest will be published every Monday, along with an essay by each judge explaining his or her choice. The Reader reader who best predicts the judges’ rulings will win a trip to Mexico.
Sue Kwong
As I read Jake Austen’s perfectly reasonable round-one essay that elevated Studs Terkel’s Working above Chris Ware’s Building Stories, I panicked. Austen recalled that as a teenager he once had the pleasure of witnessing Terkel in the act of eating a Chicago hot dog, a sensation he likened to “freebasing Chicago-ism.” He then gave Terkel the nod—despite his admission that “Building Stories is certainly a better book than Working.”
Both books are the result of prodigious research. (UPDATE: Or, in the case of The Jungle, maybe not so prodigious.) Wilkerson spent 15 years conducting interviews with 1,000 of the estimated six million African-Americans who, from the 1910s to the 1970s, fled the horrors of the south for the opportunities of the north and west. On the other hand, Sinclair went behind the scenes to witness firsthand the disgusting and deplorable conditions low-wage workers endured in Chicago’s meatpacking industry; out of those observations, he fashioned his muckraking novel.
“She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her,” Wilkerson writes. “She took the best of what she saw in the North and the South and interwove them in the way she saw fit. . . . Her success was spiritual, perhaps the hardest of all to achieve.”
“‘The half ain’t been told,’ she said.”
