The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame

The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame

Inductees for

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Cyrus Colter

(Jan. 8, 1910-April 15, 2002)

You grow close to your characters, and begin to share their burdens.

Colter began writing at the age of 50 and ten years later published his first book, the short story collection The Beach Umbrella, when Kurt Vonnegut chose it as the winner of the Iowa School of Letters Award. That and his first novel, River of Eros, are both naturalistic works that revolve around blue-collar African-Americans in Chicago. Night Studies won the 1980 Carl Sandburg fiction prize, though Chocolate Solider (published eight years later) is generally considered his crowning accomplishment. Colter had a full career as a lawyer before joining Northwestern University’s faculty in 1973; a few years later, he became the first black to hold an endowed chair when he was appointed chair of the department of African-American studies.

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Theodore Dreiser

(Aug. 27, 1871-Dec. 28, 1945)

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

Dreiser, who began writing for the Chicago Globe after flunking out of Indiana University, is known as a trailblazer for his generation. In his fiction and non-fiction, he tackled subjects that were considered in violation of conventional morality, including Sister Carrie (about a woman who flees the country for Chicago and eventually dabbles in illicit activities such as the theatre and rich men) and his Trilogy of Desire (based on Chicago streetcar tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes). Dreiser’s themes of social inequality and his battles with censorship earned him a reputation as a champion for literary freedom, while his style won him credit as a founder of the naturalism literary movement.

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Harriet Monroe

(Dec. 23, 1860-Sept. 26, 1936)

The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have; else they will never have better.

Best known as the founder and first editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the Chicago-born Monroe tirelessly dedicated her life to the promotion of the art. As Poetry’s editor, she helped shape the careers of such luminaries as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. She was a writer, scholar, critic and patron of the arts. Monroe gave her collection to the University of Chicago, which formally opened the Harriet Monroe Library of Poetry with a dinner that included guest speakers Carl Sandburg, Archibald MacLeish and Ford Maddox Ford—all who lauded her remarkable influence. Monroe’s will also provide $5,000 to establish a prize for distinction in poetry, a considerable gift for that time.

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Mike Royko

(September 19, 1932-April 29, 1997)

Being the smartest alderman in Chicago's City Council is something like being the tallest midget in the circus.

Winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, Royko's columns were a fixture in Chicago newspapers for more than three decades. He grew up in a Polish neighborhood on the Northwest Side of Chicago, living in an apartment above a bar, and drew on his childhood experiences to become the voice of the Everyman Chicago. "…his writing was distinctive and memorable and in its time the closest thing to lasting literature in a daily paper," Jacob Weisberg wrote for Slate. "Royko could make you laugh and make you think, stir outrage at a heartless bureaucrat, or bring a tear to the eye when he flashed a glimpse of the heart hidden beneath his hard shell." He wrote over 7,500 daily columns for three newspapers, the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. Many of his columns are collected in books, but his most famous book remains Boss, a devastating portrait of Richard J. Daley and machine politics that New York columnist Jimmy Breslin called "the best book ever written about a city of this country."

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