SOURCE: “The Dill Pickle and the End of Chicago,” in Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America, Covici-Friede Publishers, 1933, pp. 200–11.

In the following essay, Parry examines the writers and cultural mileau of post-World War I Chicago.

The notoriety of Greenwich Village in the late 1910s was spreading among other places to Chicago. To youngsters constantly joining the Chicago studios, things seemed dull in comparison with the crazy antics reported from New York. The youngsters wanted genuine, not pretended excitement. The dancing of Princess Lou seemed uneventful, the sessions at Schlogl's tables appeared too conversational, Margaret Anderson was too individualistic. The youngsters wanted a group bang. They got it when the Dill Pickle was formed and derided in the second half of the decade.

Floyd Dell remarked to me, in passing, that the Dill Pickle was “one of those imitations of Greenwich Village,” hence not the real...