"Chicago Dreaming is about imagining city life. Where William Cronon revealed to us the material relationships between Chicago and its hinterlands, Timothy Spears explores the cultural ties in those early years when the city exploded with energy. Chicago Dreaming captures how Midwestern migrants to the city created a metropolis of the mind. This is first-rate cultural history."

Elliott Gorn, Brown University

"Chicago Dreaming is a signal achievement in cultural history and literary analysis, an achievement all the more impressive and engaging because of the lucidity of the writing. The combination of the importance of the story being told and the quality of the telling will make this a classic in writing about the city. Spears’s book greatly advances and enriches our knowledge of both Chicago and American literature and cultural life."

Carl Smith, Northwestern University

"Chicago Dreaming is a strong, original, and highly readable book. It’s not only a new look at Chicago literature, American realism, and the city as historical and literary artifact, it’s also a compelling example of how to write about literature and the real world in relation to one another."

Carlo Rotella, Boston College

"The achievement of Chicago Dreaming is twofold. First, Spears skillfully integrates social and cultural history. . . . Second, Spears presents a new, more complicated vision of Chicago. Chicagoans’ interior worlds--their dreams--were full of paradox and juxtaposition: provincial and cosmopolitan, immigrant and native-born, rural pioneers and urban multiethnics. . . . As a frenetic, chaotic, expanding urban community, Chicago was shaped by not just material conditions but also by memory, nostalgia, and emotions."

Tomothy J. Gilfoyle | Business History Review

"Spears’s book makes a solid contribution to Chicago- and American Studies. His argument that some of modernism’s roots may be discernmed in rural mid-America is a needed corrective to the too-prevalent assumption that modernism is purely the byproduct of a fragmented, thoroughly urbanized consciousness."

James Guthrie | Dreiser Studies