Stories of Chicago

by George Ade

Originally published anonymously between 1893 and 1900 in a column in the "Chicago Record," a collection of stories offers a look at the social life of Chicago in the Gay Nineties.

Genres: Humor

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

George Ade (February 9, 1866 – May 16, 1944) was an American writer, newspaper columnist, and playwright.

Ade's literary reputation rests upon his achievements as a great humorist of American character during an important era in American history: the first large wave of migration from the countryside to burgeoning cities like Chicago, where, in fact, Ade produced his best fiction. He was a practicing realist during the Age of (William Dean) Howells and a local colorist of Chicago and the Midwest. His work constitutes a vast comedy of Midwestern manners and, indeed, a comedy of late 19th-century American manners. In 1915, Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford professor and man of letters, while on a lecture tour in America, called George Ade "the greatest living American writer."

(wikipedia)

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Columns from the Chicago Record, 1893-1900: straightforward descriptions of neighborhoods and accounts of people Ade met, a few short stories, all instructive and fairly entertaining. Nothing that shows the brilliance of "Fables in Slang," though -- until page 201, where he starts to parody boys' adventure stories with the hilarious "Handsome Cyril," "Clarence Allen, the Hypnotic Boy Journalist" and "Rollo Johnson, Boy Inventor." Next comes "The Fable of Sister Mae," in the classic style -- except that almost all the long words in the latter are hyphenated into individual syllables. Maybe Ade's editor complained that his vocabulary was too high-flown, and this was the response.

Much better than Ben Hecht's collection of local-color newspaper columns, "A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago" (1922), which is too self-consciously literary for my taste. Anyway, you don't have to be from Chicago to enjoy this. I've never set foot there.

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of vignettes by master story-teller and newspaper columnist George Ade. In this book Ade has captured turn of the century Chicago through sketches of her characters and places. Interesting for the resident Chicagoan to read and compare current localities with their past incarnations.

[Jerry-Mac · Rating 4 out of 5]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13646984