The Reader Refuses to Admit That Studs Terkel’s Working Is the Greatest Chicago Book Ever (Yet)
Early this winter, the Reader announced an NCAA-style tournament to declare the Greatest Chicago Book Ever (it’s Working). They scoured the city’s literary history to find fifteen books that were not Working and put them in a bracket with Working, in a futile exercise to challenge Studs Terkel’s well-earned, ear-to-the-ground supremacy. With the first round clear, Working won out against Chris Ware’s Building Stories (good so far), while Richard Wright’s Native Son lost to Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. Elsewhere on the bracket, Veronica Roth’s Divergent languished and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle surpassed Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House for being slightly more readable and slightly less dense. But, as the judges discussed last Saturday at the Seminary Co-op, it’s a futile question. How can we really judge the best Chicago book ever? Are we looking for the greatest literary work about Chicago? Or the book that most embodies the city? What’s up with this dominant Big Shoulders narrative? Where are the women? Reader editors and Chicago lit-folk politely compared the strengths of each book and circled around those questions, all while stubbornly refusing to declare Working the best. Writer, producer, and all-around Chicago music guy Jake Austen gave the book a well-thought-out and personal defense, second only in passion to Bill Savage’s argument for City on the Make, which was emailed in and read aloud. Austen recalled—as Chicagoans over a certain age are wont to do—a chance encounter with Terkel himself: a high school Austen and his girlfriend (now wife) gate-crashed an upscale Michigan Avenue reception and ended up in the next day’s society pages after spotting Studs eating a Chicago-style hot dog. In the Sem Co-op, the Reader editors reminded spectators to vote on the contest results online. Filtering out, the Weekly staff did not chant “Working,” but we thought about it.
Answer key below.
Answer key: (1) Working (2) Native Son (3) Boss (4) The Warmth of Other Suns (5) The Adventures of Augie March (6) Building Stories (7) City on the Make (8) The House on Mango Street (9) The Book of My Lives (10) I Sailed with Magellan (11) The Jungle (12) Twenty Years at Hull-House (13) I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It (14) Devil in the White City (15) The Time Traveler’s Wife (16) N/A