SOURCE: “Chicago in Fiction,” in The Bookman, Vol. XXXVIII, November 3, 1913, pp. 270-77.

In the following essay, Dell contrasts Fuller's Chicago novels with those of Frank Norris and Robert Herrick.

I

“Chicago,” wrote Frank Norris scornfully in one of his early tales, “is not a place where stories happen.” San Francisco was still large enough for his imagination—San Francisco, and the bay, and the ocean of piracy and adventure beyond, and on the other side of the city the great wheat fields of California. But the wheat, capturing his imagination, led him to Chicago, and in The Pit he undertook to prove himself wrong. He tried to show that stories could happen in Chicago.

He came, and saw, and wrote his novel. An astonishing capacity for seeing, he had, too. In him the reporting instinct amounted to genius. He sketched the city in broad, powerful strokes, taking in...