This chapter examines the two Chicago-set graphic novels of Chris Ware entitled Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) and Building Stories (2012), as well as Lost Buildings (2004), Ware’s “on-stage radio & picture collaboration” with Ira Glass for National Public Radio. The chapter argues that Ware’s body of work explores how various human networks engage with the storied history and urban geography of his adopted city, and that it does so in endlessly experimental ways that have continued to redefine the expressive potential of the comics form. In these works, Ware creates complex visual narratives in which the city and its ever-changing urban landscape is often as much of a character as the people inhabiting it, and his meticulously drawn pages are thus an attempt not only to depict and make sense of Chicago but also to create a visual index of the relationship between its spatial and emotional lives. Despite his untraditional choice of form, this approach places him in a lineage of Chicago writers that reaches all the way back to the earliest recorders of life in the city.

This chapter traces the career of Henry Blake Fuller from the 1890s through the opening of the twentieth century. Fuller, a scion of one of the city’s first families and student of Chicago’s social networks and institutions, began by writing travel romances set in the Italian past. Turning quickly to literary realism, he depicted the rapidly expanding city of his birth, becoming arguably the first Midwestern writer to set his novels in the tumultuous environment of the growing metropolis. Fuller’s novels The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) and With the Procession (1895) were unvarnished critiques of Chicagoans’ materialist priorities, social ambitions, and unethical business practices, as well as the psychological and communal fractures caused by the accelerated pace of the city. Applying the structural principles of architecture to new methods of narration, Fuller’s novels of this period represent stylistic and conceptual differences between his practice of realism and that of his better-known contemporaries. The chapter also discusses Fuller’s long-standing interest in the Chicago art scene in books like Under the Skylights (1901), in which art and commerce struggle for primacy.