The City as Image: Nelson Algren and the Chicago School

FAIN: FB-12496-75

David T. Boxer
Cal Poly Humboldt Sponsored Programs Foundation (Arcata, CA 95521-8222)

To study the urban novel from an American Studies perspective, focusing on Chicago writers. To investigate how American writers have employed the City --metaphorically, symbolically, and allegorically --to portray the tensions between American rural-agrarian ideals and their transformation into urban-industrial realities. After preliminary study, work will focus on investigation on The City as idea and image in American fiction, in particular in the works of the Chicago novelist, Nelson Algren, and his contemporaries in the 1930s and 1940s.