Chicago's Literary Hall of Fame

[Jerry Peterson]

A gaggle of Chicago writers were sitting around a table – maybe at the Billy Goat Tavern with a beer in hand – wondering how they could honor the best of their numbers. And someone said, “Hey, we need a hall of fame. They got ’em for football players, race car drivers, and Greyhound dogs [the National Greyhound Hall of Fame is in Kansas]. Surely we can have one for writers.”

And thus the Chicago Writers Association created the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame a year and a month ago. The Hall doesn’t have a home yet, but it has a website and, as of May 1, it has its first inductees.

Now you have to admit at the top that Chicago has had and continues to have a lot of superb writers, from Carl Sandburg and Ernest Hemingway to Gwendolyn Brooks and Scott Turow.

The CWA pulled together a 14-member committee to select the first set of nominees. These were to be writers from the past, writers who are no longer living.

The committee came forward with 78 names, then whittled the group down to 27. A separate selection panel then took on the tough job of selecting six from that list, the six writers who would become the first class inducted into the hall.

And the nominations, please – drum roll: Jane Addams, Nelson Algren, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Oscar Brown Jr., Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Callaway, Cyrus Colter, Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Edna Ferber, Leon Forrest, Lorraine Hansberry, Ben Hecht, Ernest Hemingway, Fenton Johnson, Norman Maclean, Edgar Lee Masters, Harriet Monroe, Franklin Rosemont, Mike Royko, Carl Sandburg, Shel Silverstein, Studs Terkel, Ida B. Wells, and Richard Wright.

What a distinguished group. I’ve read or taught the works of 16 and know well the lives of four more. Seven are strangers to me, but when I read their mini-bios, I was impressed with what they did and what they wrote.

And now the first inductees – trumpet fanfare: Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Studs Terkel, and Richard Wright.

If I were on the selection committee and had I the power to make the number nine, I would have added Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, and Mike Royko. I have no doubt they will be voted in in a future year, perhaps even Sherwood Anderson.

Tomorrow: Meet the first of the inductees – Nelson Algren