Chicago and the Making of American Modernism

by Michelle E Moore

  4 M. Catherine Downs, Becoming Modern: Willa Cather’s Journalism (Susquehanna, PA: Susquehanna UP, 1999), 28.

  5 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 46.

  6 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 52.

  7 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 69.

  8 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 329.

  9 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 161–163.

  10 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, 1913, Box 1, Folder 21, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL.

  11 Elia W. Peattie, “Season’s Offering of New Books: Romance of Western Pioneers,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 1913, 13.

  12 Peattie, “Season's Offering of New Books,” 13.

  13 Martinez, “A Mixed Reception for Modernism,” 34.

  14 Martinez, “A Mixed Reception for Modernism,” 49.

  15 Joan Stevenson Falcone, “Introduction,” The Star Wagon: The Memoirs of Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Elia Peattie: An Uncommon Writer, An Uncommon Woman, University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, accessed October 12, 2017, plainshumanities.unl.edu/peattie/about.html

  16 Falcone, “Introduction.”

  17 Falcone, “Introduction.”

  18 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, February 4, 1937, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  19 For more about Cather’s personal and intellectual connection to Henry Blake Fuller, see Richard C. Harris, “Willa Cather and Henry Blake Fuller: More Building Blocks for The Professor’s House,” in Cather Studies 9, ed. Melissa J. Homestead and Guy Reynolds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 114–132.

  20 Susan Weininger, “Completing the Soul of Chicago: From Urban Realism to Social Concern, 1915–1945,” in Chicago Modern 1893–1945: The Pursuit of the New, ed. Elizabeth Kennedy (Chicago, IL: The Terra Foundation for American Art, 2004), 54.

  21 Weininger, "Completing the Soul of Chicago,” 54.

  22 Charlotte Moser, “‘In the Highest Efficiency’: Art Training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,” in The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 202.

  23 Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, 1915, ed. Sherrill Harbison (New York: Penguin, 1999), 26.

  24 Loretta Wasserman, “Cather’s Semitism,” in Cather Studies 2, ed. Susan J. Rosowski (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 9.

  25 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 186.

  26 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 44.

  27 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 205.

  28 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 171.

  29 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 171–172.

  30 Miller, City of the Century, 409.

  31 Miller, City of the Century, 409.

  32 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 173.

  33 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 241.

  34 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 242.

  35 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 241.

  36 Mark A. Robison, “Transcending the Urban-Rural Divide: Willa Cather’s Thea Kronborg Goes to Chicago,” in Regionalism and the Humanities, ed. Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 207.

  37 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 344–345.

  38 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 389.

  39 Ann W. Fisher-Wirth, “Dispossession and Redemption in the Novels of Willa Cather,” in Cather Studies 1, ed. Susan J. Rosowski (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 37.

  40 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 228.

  41 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 228.

  42 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 228.

  43 Melissa Homestead, “Introduction,” in The Song of the Lark, ed. Melissa Homestead (New York: Signet Classics, 2007), xi.

  44 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 213.

  45 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 213.

  46 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 213.

  47 Regenry, The Cliffdwellers: The History of a Chicago Cultural Institution, 9.

  48 Regenry, The Cliffdwellers: The History of a Chicago Cultural Institution, 9.

  49 Willa Cather, “The Passing Show,” Nebraska State Journal (January 26, 1896): 9, reprinted in The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 330–331.

  50 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 51.

  51 Sharon O’Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), 85.

  52 Homestead, “Introduction,” xii.

  53 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 231.

  54 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 230.

  55 Miller, City of the Century, 414–415.

  56 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 232.

  57 Polly P. Duryea, “Paintings and Drawings in Willa Gather’s Prose: A Catalogue Raisonné,” Diss., University of Nebraska, 1993, 18.

  58 “Street Singer Provenance,” Museum of Fine Arts Boston, accessed June 14, 2017, mfa.org/collections/object/street-singer-33971

  59 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 231.

  60 Stefan Germer, “Traditions and Trends: Taste Patterns in Chicago Collecting,” in The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 177.

  61 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 230.

  62 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 268.

  63 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 269.

  64 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 50.

  65 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 50.

  66 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 169.

  67 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 235.

  68 Lefkowitz, Culture and the City, 170.

  69 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 232.

  70 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 231.

  71 Wasserman, “Cather's Semitism,” 8.

  72 Wasserman, “Cather's Semitism,” 13.

  73 Willa Cather, “On the Art of Fiction,” in Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as Art (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 103.

  74 Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and The Opera, 1815–1930 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006), 143.

  75 James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 282, 315.

  76 Rutherford, The Prima Donna and The Opera, 1815–1930, 144.

  77 Rutherford, The Prima Donna and The Opera, 1815–1930, 146.

  78 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 283.

  79 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 215–216.

  80 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 174.

  81 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 185.

  82 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Cultur (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 351.

  83 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 205.

  84 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 11.

  85 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 339.

  86 See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982).

  87 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 345.

  88 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 246.

  89 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 351.

  90 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 363.

  91 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 363.

  92 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 368.

  93 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 368.

  94 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey and others, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), XVII, 235.

  95 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 253.

  96 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 341.

  97 Cather, The Song of the Lark, 341.

  98 Adele Hast, “Bookwomen Building Chicago—the Fanny Butcher Story,” Caxton Club, accessed Oct
ober 12, 2017, caxtonclub.org/reading/2002/May/bookwomen.htm

  99 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, February 16, 1916, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  100 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, March 9, 1916, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  101 Hast, “Bookwomen Building Chicago—the Fanny Butcher Story.”

  102 Correspondence from Sinclair Lewis to Fanny Butcher, Box 5, Folder 234, and Correspondence from Sherwood Anderson to Fanny Butcher, Box 1, Folder 15, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  103 Celia Hilliard, “Lady Midwest: Fanny Butcher—Books,” in The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop: Books and the Commerce of Culture in the Twentieth Century, ed. Huw Osborne (New York: Routledge, 2015), 89–112.

  104 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, November 14, 1922, Box 1, Folder 25, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL.

  105 Correspondence from Fanny Butcher to Willa Cather, March 18, 1926, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  106 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, November 14, 1922, Box 1, Folder 30, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL.

  107 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, November 10, 1929, Box 1, Folder 53, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL.

  108 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, November 5, 1921, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  109 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, February 7, 1924, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  110 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, December 2, 1920, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  111 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, April 8, 1921, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  112 Fanny Butcher, Many Lives, One Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 363.

  113 Butcher, Many Lives, One Love, 363.

  114 Butcher, Many Lives, One Love, 364.

  115 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 305.

  116 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 324.

  117 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, October 26, 1922, Box 1, Folder 28, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL.

  118 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Irene Miner Weisz, January 21, 1923, Box 1, Folder 32, Willa Cather—Irene Miner Weisz Papers, NL.

  119 Jewell and Stout, Selected Letters, 324.

  120 Correspondence from Willa Cather to Fanny Butcher, December 18, 1936, Fanny Butcher Papers, Box 2, Folder 90, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  121 Correspondence from Edith Lewis to Fanny Butcher, October 8, 1949, Box 2, Folder 92, Fanny Butcher Papers, NL.

  Chapter 5

  1 Alfred T. Hemingway, How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success: A Business Man’s Talks on Personal Proficiency and Commercial Character Building—the Only Success Insurance (Kansas City, MO: Personal Proficiency Bureau, 1915), Box BK01, JFK.

  2 Hemingway, How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success, 5.

  3 Hemingway, How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success, 1.

  4 Hemingway, How to Make Good or Winning Your Largest Success, 7.

  5 Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration (Chicago: J. S. Goodman and Co., 1872), 319.

  6 Colbert and Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration, 398.

  7 “Printing News of the Country,” Printing Trade News 40, no. 10 (March 11, 1911): 11.

  8 “Trade Extension Committee Dines Hundreds of Visiting Men at South Shore Country Club,” Journal of Chicago Commerce 8, no. 11 (July 19, 1912): 6–8, 7.

  9 David Malone, “Grand Papa Hemingway,” Recollections: Retelling Stories of Gems from Special Collections, Buswell Library, recollections, accessed January 2, 2018, wheaton.edu/2008/12/grand-papa-hemingway

  10 Timothy Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute and the Making of American Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 25–26.

  11 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, 27.

  12 Michael Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1998), 10–11.

  13 Correspondence from Anson T. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, May 10, 1918, Box IC10, Folder 48, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK.

  14 Correspondence from Anson T. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, May 10, 1918, Box IC10, Folder 48, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK.

  15 Correspondence from Clarence E. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, April 17, 1918, Folder 2, Box IC11, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK.

  16 Ernest Hemingway, “Letter to Marcelline Hemingway,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, vol. 1, 1907–1922, ed. Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), 157–158.

  17 Correspondence from Clarence E. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, February 4, 1920, Box IC11, Folder 4, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK.

  18 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 93.

  19 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 93.

  20 Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981), 861.

  21 Joseph A. Dimuro, “Introduction,” in The Cliff-Dwellers, ed. Joseph A. Dimuro (New York: Broadview, 2010), 30.

  22 Howells, “The Cliff-Dwellers,” 883, reprinted in Cliff-Dwellers, ed. Dimuro, 273.

  23 Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (Washington, DC: Free Press, 2007), 102–105.

  24 Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg, The Achievements of Luther Trant (Boston, MA: Maynard and Company Publishers, 1910), 3.

  25 See Gertrude Stein, “Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention,” Psychological Review 5 (1898): 295–306. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. 1962. Reprint (New York: Vintage, 1990), 73.

  26 Hugo Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand: Essays in Psychology and Crime (New York: DoubleDay, Page, and Co., 1909), 134.

  27 Edwin Balmer and Thomas Balmer, The Science of Advertising: The Force of Advertising as a Business Influence, Its Place in the National Development and the Public Result of Its Practical Operation (New York: Duffield and Company, 1910), 8.

  28 “Hard-boiled, adj.,” OED Online, January 2018, Oxford University Press, accessed February 23, 2018, http://www.oed.com.cod.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/84135?rskey=YqDqGN&result=2&isAdvanced=false

  29 “Hard-boiled, adj.”

  30 Ernest Hemingway and George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway,” Paris Review 18 (Spring 1958): 85–108. Cited from The collection, The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 1 (New York: Picador, 2001), 61.

  31 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 91.

  32 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 92.

  33 Baker, Letters, 209.

  34 “To William B. Smith Jr. (January 30, 1925),” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, ed. Sandra Spanier, Albert J. DeFazzio III, and Robert W. Trogden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 237.

  35 Correspondence from Arnold Gingrich to Ernest Hemingway, August 28, 1934, Box IC09, Folder 8, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK.

  36 Peter Griffin, Along with Youth: Hemingway the Early Years (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), 243.

  37 Griffin, Along with Youth, 139.

  38 Griffin, Along with Youth, 139.

  39 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 181.

  40 “The Book Fair,” Chicago Tribune, October 23, 1920: 26.

  41 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 147.

  42 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 188.

  43 Correspondence from Carl Van Vechten to Henry Blake Fuller, June 6, 1922, Box 6, Folder 233, Henry Blake Fuller Papers, NL.

  44 Correspondence from Clarence E. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, March 6, 1927, Box IC11, Folder 6, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK. Correspondence from Clarence E. Hemingway to Ernest Hemingway, March 22, 1927, Box IC11, Folder 6, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK.


  45 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, 186, footnote 39.

  46 Draft, Ernest Hemingway, “Condensing the Classics,” Undated, Box MS39, Folder 335, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK.

  47 Hemingway, “Condensing the Classics.”

  48 Baker, Letters, 89.

  49 Baker, Letters, 94–95.

  50 Baker, Letters, 117.

  51 Leonard J. Leff, Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 1997), 14.

  52 “To William B. Smith Jr., on January 8, 1925,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 204.

  53 “To William B. Smith, January 30, 1925,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 237.

  54 Baker, Letters, 161.

  55 “To Dos Passos, April 22, 1925,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 322.

  56 “To Jane Heap, June 12, 1925,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 2 1923–1925, 349.

  57 Baker, Letters, 163.

  58 Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (New York: Scribner, 1925), 61.

  59 Hemingway and Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway,” 57, 61.

  60 Hemingway and Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway,” 57.

  61 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribners, 2006 [1926]), 42.

  62 Bruce Barton, Atlantic Monthly 139 (April 1927): 12–14, in Robert O. Stephens, ed., Ernest Hemingway: The Critical Reception (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 46.

  63 Griffin, Along with Youth, 59.

  64 Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 4.

  65 Leo B. Ribuffo, “Jesus Christ as Business Statesman: Bruce Barton and the Selling of Corporate Capitalism,” American Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Summer, 1981): 207.

  66 Correspondence from Arnold Gingrich to Ernest Hemingway, August, 4, 1933, Box IC09, Folder 7, Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK.

  67 “Fifty Grand,” in Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Finca Vigía Edition (New York: Scribner, 1987), 241.

  68 “Letter to Louis and Mary Bromfield 8 March 1926,” in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway vol. 3 1926–1929, ed. Rena Sanderson, Sandra Spanier, and Robert W. Trogden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 36.

  69 Robert W. Trogden, The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners and the Business of Literature (Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2007).