Great literature casts light on the human condition with force and clarity. It is our tradition, every fall, to step back, take a break from the heartbreak of the headlines and affirm this commitment to the transformative power of the written word.
In “Chicago, City on the Make,” Nelson Algren wrote:
“Big-shot town, small-shot town, jet-propelled old-fashioned town, by old-world hands with new-world tools built into a place whose heartbeat carries farther than its shout, whose whispering in the night sounds less hollow than its roistering noontime laugh: they have builded a heavy-shouldered laughter here who went to work too young.”
Algren, famous also for “The Man With the Golden Arm,” which won the first National Book Award (1950), embodied Chicago writing. “There was a poetic, lyric quality to his writing,” remembers his friend, Studs Terkel. “He wrote about all Chicago.”
The short-story competition named for him emerged shortly after he died in 1981. This year, more than 2,500 stories were entered in it, and today we publish the winning story, “Space,” by Kevin Moffett. The runners-up, also published in this section, are “Some Other Time, Not This Time,” by David Michael Kaplan, and, for the first time ever, two winning stories–“The Third Country” and “The Monkey King”–written by the same person, Sharon May.
On Nov. 6, Margaret Atwood, celebrated and eloquent author of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Blind Assassin” and “Oryx and Crake” and one of our most insightful cultural critics, will receive the 2005 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement. She will take the stage at Orchestra Hall, following in the footsteps of previous winners Tom Wolfe and the late Arthur Miller and August Wilson. (Please see this week’s Magazine profile of Atwood.)
Later that day, the Tribune will award the 2005 Heartland Prizes. Marilynne Robinson will accept the fiction honors for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Gilead,” the poetic, modern-day testament of a dying Iowa preacher, and Kevin Boyle will receive the non-fiction prize for his book “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age,” which movingly recounts the violent, difficult struggle to integrate America’s Northern industrial cities.
The Chicago Tribune Young Adult Book Prize went to Linda Sue Park, author of “Project Mulberry,” a novel about assimilation and cultural pride. As part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, Park was to have received her award Saturday.
Tickets for these events are available by calling the Chicago Humanities Festival ticket office at 312-494-9509, or through its Web site, chfestival.org.
— Elizabeth Taylor, literary editor
