Chicago literary renaissance, the flourishing of literary activity in Chicago from approximately 1912 to 1925. The leading writers of this renaissance—Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg—realistically depicted the contemporary urban environment, decrying the loss of traditional rural values in the increasingly industrialized and materialistic American society and the failure of the romantic promise that hard work would automatically bring material and spiritual rewards.

Most of these writers were originally from small Midwestern towns and were deeply affected by the regionalism of the 1890s that foreshadowed the realism of 20th-century literature. The renaissance also encompassed the revitalization of journalism as a literary medium; writers such as Floyd Dell, Anderson, Dreiser, and Sandburg all were associated at one time with Chicago newspapers. The Little Theatre established in that city in 1912 by Maurice Browne became an important outlet for the creative talents of young playwrights.

The first stirrings of the Chicago renaissance were felt after the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893, an event that attracted young Midwestern writers to the city. The Little Room, a literary group that included both artists and patrons of the arts, encouraged literary activity. The Dial magazine, established in 1880, grew to be a respected literary organ. Henry Blake Fuller and Robert Herrick, who belonged to the genteel tradition, wrote several novels that foreshadowed the later realistic novels of Dreiser and Anderson. Hamlin Garland, already famous for novels on the bleakness of Midwestern rural life, was associated briefly with the Little Room.

The appearance of Dreiser’s pivotal naturalistic novel Sister Carrie (published 1900; suppressed until 1912), Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Masters’ collection of poetic epitaphs, Spoon River Anthology (1915), and Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916) marked the height of the renaissance. Two Chicago literary magazines—Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, and the Little Review (1914–29), founded by Margaret Anderson—published exciting new verse by Masters, Sandburg, and other local poets such as Vachel Lindsay. Dell, a journalist associated with the Friday Literary Review (1908), the weekly literary supplement to the Chicago Evening Post, was the center of a vital literary circle that included Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Margaret Anderson, and Monroe.

After World War I the writers began to disperse, and by the Great Depression of the 1930s the Chicago literary renaissance had ended.