Book Reviews 39 1 Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880-1920. By Carl S. Smith. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pp. xiv, 232. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, in- dex. Paperbound, $8.95.) Each word in Carl Smith’s title is telling. He has not writ- ten a history of Chicago literature but rather a more interesting study of the impact of Chicago on the imagination of writers in the crucial years 1880-1920. What did Chicago mean to writers? By examining not only works of fiction but also autobiography, travel books, guidebooks, histories, and muckraking criticism, Smith defines literature broadly and shows how a wide range of writers portrayed life in this quintessentially American city. He is particularly interested in texts which “directly and indirectly discussed the relationship of literature, art, and urban life” (pp. xi-xii). Part One describes how Chicago writers, in struggling for words to express their response to the industrial city, created works in which an artist protagonist seeks a place in raw Chicago, usually unsuccessfully. These writers thereby revealed the tension that they themselves experienced in both living in Chicago and trying to write about it. After examining Jane Addams’s plea for an integration of life and art, Smith turns to works by E. P. Roe, Henry Blake Fuller, Robert Herrick, and Will Payne; all but Roe were less optimistic than Addams that art could survive in materialistic Chicago. If male artists fail, women who aspire to culture fare no better, whether as artists themselves or as consumers of art. Either they retreat to domesticity or, like Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber, they become victims of their own drive to suc- ceed. Only Willa Cather’s Thea Kronburg is able to use her art to transcend society. No artist can reform it. In the final and best section of Part One, Smith shows how Frank Norris, Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson attempted to portray businessmen as artists. He blames their failure to con- vince readers that Jadwin, Cowperwood, or McPherson are artist financiers on their own ambivalence and confusion in regard to the businessman in Chicago. Part Two looks at three major motifs in Chicago literature- the railroad, the new buildings (especially skyscrapers), and the stockyards-and analyzes the ways these were used to convey the experience of living in Chicago. Each of these multidisciplinary studies is interesting (although the chapter on railroads seems poorly organized), but they show up the main problem with the book: each chapter seems a discreet essay, with little connection to others except thematically. The introduction provides an ex- 392 Indiana Magazine of History cellent overview and the conclusion a proper summation, but the blocks between are without mortar. One wishes that the analy- sis were spread throughout rather than concentrated so entirely at either end of this otherwise striking and worthwhile book. Still, it is highly recommended not just to students of literature but also to urban historians. Indiana University, Bloomington Cynthia D. Kinnard The Civil Works Administration, 1933-1934: The Business of Emergency Employment in the New Deal. By Bonnie Fox Schwartz. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Pp. xviii, 300. Tables, notes, note on sources, index. $28.50.) Bonnie Fox Schwartz’s study is a well-researched and writ- ten account of an important, but often overlooked, New Deal agency. Created after the initial legislative surge of Roosevelt’s first one hundred days and overshadowed by the highly publi- cized Public Works and Works Progress administrations, this short-lived agency has received little treatment from historians. But the CWA compiled an impressive record. At its peak it em- ployed over four million workers and pumped an estimated one billion dollars of purchasing power into the sagging economy. Workers built 40,000 schools, 500,000 miles of roads, and thou- sands of hospitals and playgrounds. Created in November, 1933, and demobilized in the spring of 1934, the CWA helped millions of unemployed weather the severe winter months. Schwartz’s work consists of nine chapters dealing with such topics as the origin and structure of the CWA program, the con- flict between social workers and corporate liberals for control of the agency, the CWA in the states, labor, women, and CWA projects for white collar and professional workers. Schwartz con- tends that the CWA was the most efficient and best run of all New Deal relief agencies. Much of this success she attributes to corporate liberals: engineers, economic planners, and industrial managers who temporarily supplanted social workers and ran the CWA as an efficient business. The CWA paid living wages rather than security wages and provided meaningful public em- ployment rather than charitable make-work. She feels the man- agement techniques employed by these technicians created an efficient and effective relief agency that has been unequaled by any government relief program in the last fifty years. While different in many respects, the CWA shared some of the same problems of other New Deal relief agencies. Conflict with state political leaders over control of appointments, inter- nal disputes-such as those between social workers and corporate .