SOURCE: "Mike Royko: Midwestern Satirist," Midamerica X, Vol. 10, 1983, pp. 177-86.

[In the following essay, Somers assesses Royko's talents as a satirist.]

Mike Royko is a nationally syndicated newspaper writer whose columns first appeared in the Chicago Daily News in 1966 and continued there until the paper's demise in 1978. They are now featured in the Chicago Sun Times. Selected columns have been reprinted in three books: Up Against It (1967), I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It (1968), and Slats Grobnik and Some Other Friends (1973). Although his 1971 book, Boss: Richard J. Daly of Chicago, was widely acclaimed—outside the mayor's office—this study will concern itself with Royko's reprinted columns, considering him as a Midwesterner, an American humorist, a satirist, and, finally, as a moralist who is outraged by the world as he sees it.

Writing within the confining genre of the daily—thrice weekly during most of his years at...