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5 books match the query 'Savage, Bill'

cover of A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago

A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago

Ben Hecht

University of Chicago Press, 2009

In 1921, Ben Hecht wrote a column for the Chicago Daily News that his editor called “journalism extraordinary; journalism that invaded the realm of literature.” Hecht’s collection of sixty-four of these pieces, illustrated with striking pen drawings by Herman Rosse, is a timeless caricature of urban American life in the jazz age, updated with a new Introduction for the twenty-first century. From the glittering opulence of Michigan Avenue to the darkest ruminations of an escaped convict, from captains of industry to immigrant day laborers, Hecht captures 1920s Chicago in all its furor, intensity, and absurdity.

“The hardboiled audacity and wit that became Hecht’s signature as Hollywood’s most celebrated screen-writer are conspicuous in these vignettes. Most of them are comic and sardonic, some strike muted tragic or somber atmospheric notes. . . . The best are timeless character sketches that have taken on an added interest as shards of social history.”—L. S. Klepp, Voice Literary Supplement

 

 

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cover of Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker's Guide to the Paris of America

Chicago by Day and Night

The Pleasure Seeker's Guide to the Paris of America

Paul Durica and Bill Savage

Northwestern University Press, 2013

Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker’s Guide to the Paris of America is an actual guidebook to Chicago for visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. This unauthorized handbook to the rowdy city outside the elegant fairgrounds explores pleasures high and low. The theaters and music, architectural glories, parks and boulevards, churches and synagogues, and other elevated pursuits the authors included in 1893 gave the book a veneer of high culture. But the book owed its popularity to its insider tips about Chicago's lurid and louche entertainments—drink, gambling, and sex. With a wink and tongue firmly in cheek, the original authors condemned Gilded Age vice while offering curious travelers precise directions to the dubious, decadent, and debauched quarters of the Windy City. 

To introduce this compulsively readable, gift-quality journey through the Chicago of 1893, Chicago writers and humorists Paul Durica and Bill Savage have added an expert introduction to Gilded Age Chicago and the World's Columbian Exposition. Showcasing the first Ferris wheel, dazzling new electrification technologies, and exhibits from around the world, the Exposition was Chicago’s chance to prove it had risen from the ashes of the Great Fire and would claim a place among the world’s great cities.

Both a perfect keepsake or gift for Chicago travelers as well as an invaluable text for readers interested in the history of Chicago, the Midwest, or Gilded Age urban life, Chicago by Day and Night is a beloved classic of Chicago writing. 

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cover of Chicago: City on the Make: Sixtieth Anniversary Edition

Chicago

City on the Make: Sixtieth Anniversary Edition

Nelson Algren

University of Chicago Press, 2011

“Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren’s writing that “you should not read it if you cannot take a punch.” The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its “nobodies nobody knows”: the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets.

Upon its original publication in 1951, Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people, one that boldly defied City Hall’s business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city’s breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence.

The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, “the best book about Chicago.”

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cover of The Old-Time Saloon: Not Wet - Not Dry, Just History

The Old-Time Saloon

Not Wet - Not Dry, Just History

George Ade

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Fancy a tipple? Then pull up a stool, raise a glass, and dip into this delightful paean to the grand old saloon days of yore. Written by Chicago-based journalist, playwright, and all-round wit George Ade in the waning years of Prohibition, The Old-Time Saloon is both a work of propaganda masquerading as “just history” and a hilarious exercise in nostalgia. Featuring original, vintage illustrations along with a new introduction and notes from Bill Savage, Ade's book takes us back to the long-gone men’s clubs of earlier days, when beer was a nickel, the pretzels were polished, and the sardines were free.
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cover of Time for Frankie Coolin: A Novel

Time for Frankie Coolin

A Novel

Bill Granger

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Known as much for his journalistic reporting as for the fiction he wrote under a variety of pen names, Bill Granger combined his divergent talents in his powerful novel Time for Frankie Coolin. With distinctive voices, compelling characters, on-the-ground observation, and suspense, it offers a serious, illuminating take on the changing tides of race, class, and politics in late twentieth-century Chicago.

Time for Frankie Coolin tells the story of a plasterer turned landlord in Chicago who, in the late 1970s, buys abandoned buildings and makes them just habitable enough that he can charge minimal rent to his mostly black tenants. Frankie—both a tough guy in the trades and a family man—has done well by his wife and kids, moving them to a house in the suburbs. But a casual favor for his wife’s cousin—allowing the man to store some crates in an empty building—and a random act of arson set in motion a cascade of crises, including a menacing pair of G-men and the looming threat of prison if Frankie doesn’t talk. But since talking has never been one of Frankie’s strengths, he copes as he always has: by trying to tough it out on his own.

Calling to mind such gritty poets of the urban scene as George V. Higgins and Nelson Algren, Time for Frankie Coolin is both a psychological thriller and a ’70s Chicago period piece that shines a surprisingly sympathetic light on the often ignored stories of the people who lived, worked, and died at the city’s margins.
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