- Sue Kwong
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.
Addams’s method was the settlement house, where wealthy people would live among poor people, their house providing a refuge from the city. Factory workers could discuss art and literature, immigrants could learn English and practice the crafts and eat the foods of their homelands, and settlement workers, many of whom were, like Addams, sheltered young women from wealthy families, could have a purpose in life outside of being good daughters, wives, and mothers.
In The Jungle, Sinclair had hoped to illuminate the plight of the workingman and demonstrate that socialism was the way of the future by telling the story of an ordinary man crushed by the system. Almost from the moment Jurgis Rudkus and his family arrive in Chicago from Lithuania, they are besieged by catastrophe: a predatory mortgage, a house infested with lice and roaches, dangerous jobs in the stockyards that lead to lost toes and broken limbs and tuberculosis, rape, starvation, unemployment, drunkenness, forced prostitution, jail, and death in various horrible ways (childbirth, drowning in a flooded street, being eaten alive by rats, dissolving in a vat of lard). This might be moving if Sinclair didn’t seem so gleeful about piling on the calamities. Or if the characters didn’t have the depth and personality of lousy cartoons. Like, say, Garfield.
