A Robin’s Egg Renaissance: Chicago Modernism & the Great War
The history of modernism in Chicago, as told by the writers who were there.
London, Paris, and New York all have their chroniclers, and now Chicago gets her due. A city of enormous contemporary literary vitality, it also was the home of a profoundly generative burst of creativity that helped shape modernism as we know it. Robert Alexander locates this efflorescence in its historical context, and then lets the participants speak for themselves. Part oral history, part anthology, and assembled from names well known and not (including Ford Madox Ford, Sherwood Anderson, W.E.B. DuBois, Edgar Lee Masters, and Eunice Tietjens), in A Robin’s Egg Renaissance, Alexander has assembled a chorus of voices that shaped modernist aesthetics on the shores of Lake Michigan, with after effects in places and years far beyond.
Robert Alexander grew up in Massachusetts. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and for several years taught in the Madison public schools. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, he worked for many years as a freelance editor. From 1993 to 2001, he was a contributing editor at New Rivers Press, serving for the final two years as New Rivers’ creative director. Alexander is the founding editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series at White Pine Press. He divides his time between southern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.