The rediscovery of the Chicagoan began in a classic moment of scholarly serendipity, when Neil Harris happened on the magazine in the stacks of the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, one of only two institutions with a complete set of issues. Research revealed that the magazine, published between 1926 and 1935, truly had been lost, along with a record of many of its contributing writers and artists. Part history, part sampler, and thoroughly readable, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age goes a long way toward restoring that record and giving it a context in the history of Chicago’s early twentieth-century cultural life, a field in which Harris’s own contributions loom large.

Harris’s book profiles the magazine through a selection of the best and the most representative of its covers, self-promotions, editorials, reviews, profiles, articles and features, cartoons and caricatures, and photography, all in full-size facsimiles of individual pages gathered into dedicated sections. Such dissection is balanced by cover-to-cover reproduction of one typical issue (July 2, 1927) and by Harris’s twenty-seven-page introduction and his useful prefaces to each of the sections. In the introduction, he deftly weaves the magazine’s history into the larger narrative of Chicago’s evolving self-image and national reputation, and sets the Chicagoan in relation to its admitted model and rival, the New Yorker. Discussions of the magazine’s publisher and most important contributors are supplemented by an appendix of “Contributors’ Biographies,” many of which testify to the undeserved near-oblivion from which Harris has rescued a host of talented writers and artists. They shine again in The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, where Harris’s text and the extracts from the magazine (selected with the assistance of Teri J. Edelstein) are united in an elegant and sympathetic design. By Harris’s admission, his book serves as a guide and introduction but not an index to the magazine: the serious researcher of its coverage or contributors will want to examine the full run of originals in their entirety.

The Chicagoan first appeared on local newsstands in June 1926, only sixteen months after the New Yorker’s inaugural issue. Superficially it was almost unapologetically derivative, while striving to assert an individual identity. Bi-weekly (monthly after 1931) rather than weekly like its New York rival, it featured the same triple-columned format enlivened with vignettes, and contained cartoons, reviews of books, theater, movies, and art, as well as notices of other doings around town, from politics to sports. Like the New Yorker, the first issues of the Chicagoan opened with “Talk of the Town,” subsequently retitled “Topics of the Town,” “Town Topics,” “The Chicagoan Surveys,” “The Chicagoan Says,” and “Chicagoana” (among others), but always headed by the magazine’s answer to the New Yorker’s Eustace Tilley: a stylized female head in profile, long hair streaming in Chicago’s notorious wind, holding in her open palm three magazine-reading representatives of the smart set while an exploded modernist Chicago skyline rises in the background. The magazine’s early issues “reminded readers not so much of The New Yorker as of an imitation of a college funnypaper imitating The New Yorker,” according to Time magazine on the fifth anniversary of the Chicagoan’s publication (23). Notes Harris: “Words like smart, civilized, urbane, and sophisticated abounded. The larger tone was breezy, self-assured, and confident” (9).

In the magazine’s own words, it was pointedly “not written for or to the alarm clock wards.” A record of society events, fashions, and consumption habits, it largely overlooked the vast immigrant and ethnic populations so essential to Chicago’s distinctive character and so influential in its politics of the time. In 1932, in the midst of the clamorous run-up to the Century of Progress exposition, to which the magazine devoted many celebratory pages, it ran an essay on the city’s homeless victims of the Depression by the University of Chicago’s Milton S. Mayer, illustrated with uncompromising photographs by A. George Miller. In an uncomfortable alliance between realism and good manners, Mayer incongruously sugarcoated his stark theme with the era’s signature wry tongue-in-cheek tone, while one of Miller’s images of sidewalk sleepers was partly captioned, “A quiet evening at home for some of our less busy citizens” (315). Like the city itself, the Chicagoan was torn between a hankering for civilization and defiant celebration of innate crudity and strength. In one of the many promotions with which the magazine filled space and prodded its never robust circulation, Chicago was described in contradictory hyperbole as “An unchallenged murder record—a splendid university—hobo capital to the country—railroad ruler, corn baron, liquor king—and the finest of grand opera. Altogether the most zestful spectacle on this sphere” (161).

As a mirror for the convoluted civic self-image described by Harris, the Chicagoan found a perfect publisher in Martin J. Quigley, who assumed control in early 1927 following the magazine’s shaky start under the obscure L. M. Rosen and editor Marie Armstrong Hecht, former wife of Ben Hecht. Quigley was a reform-minded conservative moralist and devout Catholic who opposed Prohibition as well as immorality in motion pictures. In the magazine’s regular opening editorial, writes Harris, “Quigley’s aversion to certain sins of the flesh sat uneasily alongside his skepticism about the ways of controlling them” (172) as he railed against political corruption, newspaper sensationalism, and, above all, Chicago’s national reputation as a crude gangsterland. The combined efforts of Quigley and William R. Weaver, his managing editor, made the Chicagoan more opinionated—on national as well as local issues—than its New York rival, thus sabotaging its aspirations toward the enviable air of urbane detachment that so distinguished the New Yorker. The Chicagoan’s perspective, as well as its coverage and intended audience, were also resolutely local. While the New Yorker appealed to the smart set nationally exactly by focusing on New York (a function of that city’s status as the American city), the Chicagoan was stamped all over with that badge of second-city anxiety: acute attention to New York. The pages reproduced by Harris testify to Chicagoans’ conviction that they and their city were the object of easterners’ scorn. Articles cover New York from a Chicagoan’s perspective, follow Chicagoans in New York, compare Chicago (favorably) to New York, and interview visiting New Yorkers (and other cosmopolites) about their (unexpectedly favorable) perceptions of Chicago.

On the positive side, the magazine intended to prove—as much to Chicago as to the rest of the world—that the city supported real culture, literary and artistic, as much as it nurtured a smart set. It did so not only in its coverage of culture but by serving as a showcase for an impressive array of the era’s writing talent, including several writers who exemplify the interrelationship between the worlds of Chicago journalism and academe. Among them were drama critic Ashton Stevens (the model for Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane); translator and author Richard Atwater (coauthor with his wife of the Newbery Medal-winning children’s book Mr. Popper’s Penguins); translator and editor Susan Wilbur, a graduate of Wellesley who held a MA from the University of Chicago; and James Weber Linn, a University of Chicago English professor and nephew of Jane Addams. Clarence J. Bulliet, later the Daily News’s combative champion of Chicago’s artistic rebels, reviewed art, and poet, painter, and dancer Mark Turbyfill covered the local dance scene. Groucho Marx, Peter Arno, and Robert Benchley (too well known to be included in Harris’s appendix) were among the numerous contributors to the magazine who had no ties to Chicago. Many others joined the perennial exodus of cultural talent eastward—and, increasingly, westward—from which the city, if not its namesake magazine, suffered. By 1931, when Time allowed that the magazine promised to be “worthy of a bigger & better Chicago,” even publisher Quigley had relocated to New York, although the Chicagoan carried no hint of his defection.

Harris admits that the Chicagoan’s coverage was light and much of its essays less than penetrating—“as interesting for their attendant illustrations as they were for their texts” (16, 240). Indeed, the glory of the Chicagoan, and perhaps the best reason for its resurrection, is its artwork, displayed in illustrations, cartoons and caricatures, vignettes, and, above all, covers. “Vibrant colors, elegant geometry, and sly humor” made them “one of its major accomplishments and announced its presence forcefully” (76). The 79 (from a total 149) glamorous covers reproduced here in full color are imaginative snapshots of the city’s landscape and famous architecture, its daily life, and the habits of its cultured set, on occasion portrayed with gentle self-deprecation. One of the most inspired covers was the magazine’s first, Boris Riedel’s vorticist vision of the city’s landmarks irresistibly swept into a cyclone swirl—as much by Chicago’s energy and excitement, one presumes, as by the wind off the lakefront. In variety and inventiveness the covers were matched by the black-and-white illustrations within. Collectively, the Chicagoan’s artwork offered in Harris’s book is a compelling cross-section of graphic design in the heyday of Art Deco.

Visually, the Chicagoan was a product worthy of the city’s lively fine-arts and design scenes of the 1920s and early 1930s, which boasted a vibrant modernist community outlined by Harris in his introduction. Among the artists who contributed covers, cartoons, vignettes, illustrations, and layouts as well as criticism are several better known as painters, muralists, theatrical designers, advertising directors, and writers. They included Anthony Angarola, Aaron Bohrod, Burton Browne, Nat Karson, A. Raymond Katz (the pseudonymous “Sandor”), Peter Koch, Gene Markey (later a successful Hollywood screenwriter), and Edward Millman (future New Deal muralist). In the thirties the magazine introduced photography, much of it strikingly experimental, by such practitioners as Gordon Coster, Victor Haveman, and Raphael G. Wolff. As with its writers, the magazine’s artists were not exclusively Chicagoans. Indeed, fourteen of the magazine’s covers were supplied by New Yorker artists; as Harris dryly observes, “No one at the New Yorker seemed to mind or, perhaps more ignominiously, to notice” (76).

After the April 1935 issue, the Chicagoan ceased publication with no warning and little notice, a victim of the economic times. It was equally the victim of a faltering moment in the city’s cultural life, arriving too late to benefit from Chicago’s literary renaissance of the years around World War I and too early for another renaissance. Just as it was issuing its last numbers, Chicago was nurturing ultimately more lasting and successful ventures in magazine publishing, notably Esquire, while laying the foundation for other claims to international importance: in the fields of architecture, theater, urban planning, and academic theorizing. Sustained on the feverish prosperity of the Jazz Age, the Chicagoan, Harris points out, lasted as long as numerous other now-forgotten periodicals. Its almost complete eclipse in posterity reflects the ability of history’s victors to control the record more than the magazine’s own shortcomings. If anything, the annihilation of the magazine would leave the record of early twentieth-century Chicago the poorer. Harris’s work ably reinstates the Chicagoan and joins the essential literature on the cultural history of Chicago and the graphic art of the period.