Chicago: The Second City

A. J. Liebling

oct 2016 · Pickle Partners Publishing

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Many Chicagoans rose in protest over A. J. Liebling’s tongue-in-cheek tour of their fair city in 1952. Liebling found much to admire in the Windy City’s people and culture—its colorful language, its political sophistication, its sense of its own history and specialness. But Liebling offended that city’s image of itself when he discussed its entertainments, its built landscapes, and its mental isolation from the world’s affairs.

Liebling, a writer and editor for the New Yorker, lived in Chicago for nearly a year. While he found a home among its colorful inhabitants, he couldn’t help comparing Chicago with some other cities he had seen and loved, notably Paris, London, and especially New York. His magazine columns brought down on him a storm of protests and denials from Chicago’s defenders, and he gently and humorously answers their charges and acknowledges his errors in a foreword written especially for the book edition.

Liebling describes the restaurants, saloons, and striptease joints; the newspapers, cocktail parties, and political wards; the university; and the defining event in Chicago’s mythic past, the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Illustrated by Steinberg, Chicago is a loving, if chiding, portrait of a great American metropolis.

“Good entertainment. The book is attractively designed, the illustrations are first-rate and Mr. Liebling can write.”—New York Times

“Mr. Liebling’s entertaining book can be highly recommended.”—New York Herald Tribune

“He has shown his readers in his lively, sardonic style exactly the split-personality city that he feels Chicago to be.”—San Francisco Chronicle

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Abbott Joseph “A. J.” Liebling (October 18, 1904 - December 28, 1963) was an American journalist who was long-time contributor and columnist for The New Yorker, from 1935 until his death in 1963. He was also the author of nineteen works of non-fiction, including The Sweet Science (1956) and Mollie and Other War Pieces (1964), which was published posthumously.