The 1001 Donors campaign aspires to raise needed funds while showcasing Chicago literature. The people below donated at least $10 and sent us short essays about a favorite Chicago book.

There is a kind of joy in sharing our favorite Chicago works, and seeing the choices others make gives us insight into the person sharing and the literature shared. It’s a sort of a club. 

We want you to join this club. We need you to join this club. Your donation will help the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame continue to highlight work from all eras while encouraging future masterpieces. 

Why 1001? A thousand and one is a big number. Ben Hecht, who set out to write a column a day for that many days, only made it a little more than halfway. We’re setting our goal as high as his, and hope to make it at least as far.

“On Carrie’s first night at her sister Minnie’s apartment – 354 W. Van Buren Street – I look out the window with her and hear horse-car bells for the first time and am entranced by city lights. And the following day, I experience Chicago’s hardness when Carrie can’t afford more than a cup of soup at a diner, and she struggles to find work along LaSalle, Madison, Dearborn, and Monroe Streets. Remarkable, how much and how little has Chicago changed.”

“Sister Carrie is the story of a young girl coming to the big city from rural Wisconsin in hopes of finding the American Dream. Dreiser divides Carrie’s story into two separate paths of survival, with Carrie becoming the mistress to two men. But it is Chicago itself that also seduces her, with its palpable energy and opportunities. As Carrie walks Van Buren Street and Jackson and Washington boulevards, and drives along Michigan Avenue, she senses the possibilities that are always just beyond her reach.”

“Meyer Levin’s The Old Bunch is Chicago’s ‘great Jewish novel.’ It follows a group of Jewish young people living on the West Side’s Lawndale neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s. They are the sons and daughters of Eastern European immigrant Jews who are aspiring to live ‘the American Dream,’ even when they are hard hit by the Great Depression. The Old Bunch especially resonates with me because I see so much of my mother and father, uncles and aunts, and their friends in Levin’s characters.”

“Native Son is noir as hell. Maybe that’s my prejudice as a crime writer, to find overlap between the genre that gets called, with derision, “airport reading” and the capital-L literary novels. But Richard Wright’s Native Son is real-deal noir: a dark story that kneecaps the reader with an unexpected crime, takes them deeply into the mind of a killer on the run, and then ends with—it’s Chinatown, Jake.”

“I discovered Chicagoan Kenneth Fearing many years ago through his signature work, The Big Clock. Fearing was my introduction to a dark, bleak world where chance encounters with dangerous strangers were likely to have a deadly outcome, a world in which double-crossing, lying, and cheating were considered necessary inter-personal and business skills. Forgotten authors who can take you in a new, surprising, and unexpected direction through a single book deserve a first reading by a new generation.”

“Imagine a Raymond Carver collection in which fewer characters sit through uncomfortable silences and more of them get clobbered with heavy objects on Milwaukee Avenue or have their pockets picked on the El. The Neon Wilderness is a book of parables. The lesson of each is that life is strange and sorrowful and will crush your soul. Maybe you’ll catch a break, probably not. The story that sticks with me most, ‘T’he Face on the Barroom Floor,’ features a legless card sharp who pummels a smart-mouthed bartender who has besmirched the honor of his peep-show girlfriend. Who else but Algren could pull this off? Who else would try?”

“City On The Make overflows with colorful colloquial language and sensual descriptions of Chicago and its people. But poetically, the book vibrates as does the music of Chicago with all its rhythms and sounds, jazz and el trains. Though Chicago: City On The Make may be historically dated, Algren’s Chicago reality becomes tactile, visceral and enduring in its truth. Our culture and swagger, the accent of our speech, all the dark sides and corruption of Chicago are what make her the loveliest of lovelies to this day.”

“When I read Dandelion Wine, it was the first time I could truly visualize the overarching story as I read it. It was the first time I became part of the story. It was the first time I experienced words and sentences strung together in such a unique way: literature with doses of realism and lyrics and poetics. He hooked me! I thought to myself: I want to be able to write a book like that someday.”

“I loved this story because I, too, grew up on Chicago's South Side. I remember when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. walked through the all-white neighborhood of Marquette Park with several thousand others to clarify fair housing. He had a dream. A Raisin in the Sun is about dreams deferred, but I took it as a message to work my dream and not bow to those who were afraid of courage and perseverance.”

“I love Henderson the Rain King not only for the lively, energetic, smart writing—comic and serious by turns and as close to a page-turner as Saul Bellow ever got—but because it played a central part in drawing me to Chicago, where I managed to fashion a career at Columbia College, engage with a host of wonderful colleagues and friends, and, ultimately, live a life that so often responded to that urgent voice in my ear, whispering, ‘I want.’ ”

“So. You’ve read In The Mecca by Gwendolyn Brooks. And now you approach Chicago buildings wondering. Not about their locations on a map but the geography of resident souls. 

This book speaks to me. It isn’t really about the Mecca Building. The building is merely the vessel for the true Chicago landmarks: the people inside. So. You’ve read In The Mecca and now you know how Gwendolyn Brooks took the special and the specific and gave us windows into the worlds of our neighbors and the worlds within ourselves.”

“In the mid-1970s, I was teaching at Highland Park High School. I liked to ask students to have conversations with people about their jobs and then write down what they had learned. Working made these youngsters feel like they were part of a larger project. They could take the book home and read about Frances Swenson, the switchboard operator; Phi Stallings, the spot welder; Nora Watson, the editor; Elmer Ruiz, the gravedigger, and the hundreds of other individuals that fill this magnificent collection.”

“Ordinary People is the coming-of-age story that most resonated with me back in the days when I was coming of age myself. The novel spotlights a teenage protagonist wrestling with life and death on Chicago’s North Shore. There’s nothing quite like the zing of reading about adolescent angst when one is rattled by one’s own adolescent angst. Ordinary People was the first book to tell me: ‘You are not alone.’ ”

“Addams. Brooks. Chicago. ‘When and how you read the work’ does not apply. I do not remember being the person I am now without carrying this poem along my path.

When local giant of social action Jane Addams meets the mighty pen of our Gwendolyn Brooks, literary sparks fly. Brooks has insight into the types of people that Addams had to navigate through to achieve change, never leaving hold of her moral compass.”

“Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago—a story collection that has lurked very close to the front door of my mind since I first read it years ago—is one of those books that makes me feel most hopeful and alive. Like his indelible characters, I too get to scavenge for bottle caps in reeking alleys and drag race past bars named Fox Head 400 and Edelweiss Tap when I read these stories.”

“The Short History of a Prince is a wonderful novel full of beautifully drawn characters, and a great Chicago novel, for the city and its environs are lovingly rendered and expertly woven in and around the fabric of the story. Jane establishes the L as a key personality trait of the city and pens a brief ode to the Chicago alley. These and a myriad of other lyrically described Chicago details make The Short History of a Prince my favorite Chicago novel.”

“Jefferey Renard Allen’s prose calls to mind Baldwin circa Just Above my Head as much as Forrest’s dissonant dreamscape in Divine Days. There is lyric poetry to be had in the quiet space between words, in the margins, too. Studied sublimity in what is a no-less original work. Yes, it is American folklore, black and bloody. But it is the ethereal and the carnal seen by the foreign that compels me in Rails Under My Back. Work well worth study, even more so worthy of reading eyes. Souls move through these pages.”

“I opened up Electric Arches to find poems, stories, images, textual art, and my heart soared. We can do this now? We can do this now! The book has no genre just as it has no limit to its imagination and its ability to envision new and better futures for Chicago. When I read Electric Arches, I feel it in my body. As I inhabit it, my muscles relax. I can feel myself become lighter inside the author’s possibilities.”

“Back in the 1970s, Nicole Hollander’s Sylviacomic strip sparked the start of my day. Outspoken Sylvia gave voice to the thoughts I shared with many other women. Hollander’s recent graphic memoir, We Ate Wonder Bread, reveals her 1940s Chicago roots from her vantage point in a world razed by the Eisenhower Expressway. She inspires my explorations of my Russian Jewish immigrant family from Maxwell Street out to Lawndale.”

“What swept me up in this journey, along with the richly developed characters and their fascinating and often heartbreaking stories, was how the city came to life for me in those pages—from Unabridged Bookstore to the 1986 Pride Parade to Marina Towers to Ann Sather to Illinois Masonic Hospital to Lincoln Park Zoo to the gorgeous apartments in Boystown—along with the beauty and strength of a community that comes together amid tragedy and devastation.”