This chapter reexamines the role urbanization played in the emergence of literary modernism in the US. The development of the skyscraper in the 1880s and increasing, and increasingly diverse, migration patterns at the turn of the twentieth century transformed Chicago and New York into important economic and cultural centers, where new literary voices and new modes of literary expression soon flourished. This chapter explores the significance of the skyscraper, that most American of architectural forms, on modernist poetry and prose fiction, as well as the ways cities enabled authors to create and navigate complex, intersecting networks of literary community. Harriet Monroe and Claude McKay serve as exemplary representatives of the modernist literary cultures that took shape in – and sometimes between – Chicago and New York, respectively.

In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century in which the writer, literary theorist, and activist Hamlin Garland lived in Chicago, he made great efforts to make the city the center of American literature. While later readers categorized his work simply as Midwest regionalism, Garland believed that regionalist literatures constituted global avant-gardes and that developing regional literary centers would lead to a transformation of literary value. This chapter surveys Garland’s work across thirty years, examining his theory of literary localism, his investment in developing the Chicago literary and artistic world, his changing vision of the American West, and his deflected relationship to early American modernism. In addition to his most famous writings, Main-Travelled Roads and Crumbling Idols, the chapter discusses less well-known works including The Land of the Straddle-Bug, Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, his writings on Alaskan mining and Native American reservations, and his biography of U. S. Grant. It also explores his affiliations with Chicago personalities including Henry Blake Fuller, Harriet Monroe, and the influential Chicago magazines the Chap-Book and Poetry.