Thomas Dyja
Author of The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream
About the Author
Thomas Dyja is a partner at the book packager and publishing firm Balliatt & Fitzgerald. Dyja lives in New York City.
Image credit: Thomas Dyja
Works by Thomas Dyja
New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation (2021) 94 copies, 2 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Dyja, Tom
- Birthdate
- 1962-07-31
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Columbia University, BA in English
- Occupations
- author
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
Chicago, Illinois, USA (birthplace) - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
Watching television and the movies, one could be fooled into thinking that everyone in the U.S.A. lives in either Southern California or a very large apartment in Manhattan. When I was a kid, some of the more "ordinary" people I saw in tv and movies were instead from Chicago, ranging from the working class family on Good Times, to the professional couple on The Bob Newhart Show, to the suburban teenagers of John Hughes movies.
In this sprawling work of cultural history, Thomas Dyja explores show more how mid-century Chicago became the template for a lot of what was considered the typical American experience for "regular" people. Freed from the restraints of New York and Los Angeles to be extraordinary, Chicagoans could excel at being ordinary in architecture, books, music, arts, and television. At the same time, though, racist white communities rose up in violence against the increasing number of Black families moving into the city (or they fled the city entirely) and the Richard Daley political machine rose up by exploiting the city's divisions.
For a book that is all over the place in the topic it covers, Dyja is good at focusing in on the details of the characters' stories and connecting them to the theme of the mid-century Chicago aesthetic. He also has a lively writing style that incorporates quotations in their unvarnished vulgarity. This is an interesting book for understanding a city at certain time, and an entertaining read.
Favorite Passages:
In this sprawling work of cultural history, Thomas Dyja explores show more how mid-century Chicago became the template for a lot of what was considered the typical American experience for "regular" people. Freed from the restraints of New York and Los Angeles to be extraordinary, Chicagoans could excel at being ordinary in architecture, books, music, arts, and television. At the same time, though, racist white communities rose up in violence against the increasing number of Black families moving into the city (or they fled the city entirely) and the Richard Daley political machine rose up by exploiting the city's divisions.
- Nelson Algren becomes Chicago's leading writer through his gritty novels and also has an on-again/off-again affair with Simone de Beauvoir.
- Gwendolyn Brooks wins the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry informed by the experience of growing up on the South Side.
- Chess Records unleashes electric blues music and early Rock & Roll with artists like Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and Chuck Berry.
- Hugh Hefner commodifies sexual liberation (for men).
- Mahalia Jackson sings songs of praise and fights for civil rights.
- Ray Kroc introduces order and consistency to dining through the McDonald's franchise.
- "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," "Stud's Place," and other innovative and influential early television programs of the "Chicago School of Television" before New York and Los Angeles completely took over television production.
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe heads the architecture school at Illinois Institute of Technology and inspires the adoption of the International Style of architecture in Chicago and then throughout the U.S.
- Elaine May and Mike Nichols improvise a new form of comic theater.
- Sun Ra creates jazz for the space age.
For a book that is all over the place in the topic it covers, Dyja is good at focusing in on the details of the characters' stories and connecting them to the theme of the mid-century Chicago aesthetic. He also has a lively writing style that incorporates quotations in their unvarnished vulgarity. This is an interesting book for understanding a city at certain time, and an entertaining read.
Favorite Passages:
"Daley's retail politics was to democratic government what McDonald's was to food and Playboy to sex: a processed and mass-marketed simulation."show less
"Before they were even completed, the Near South Side projects - which had started the city toward its Daley-era regeneration, and whose strategies, laws, and designs had created the template for much of the nation's urban renewal - were quietly deemed not worth repeating. In the end, the planners had loved their theories more than they loved Chicago."
One thing I know about myself is that I’m a very literal person. Sometimes that distracts me. The subtitle of this book is “When Chicago Built The American Dream”. I read that to mean Chicago is a source of what we consider the American Dream. With that in mind I kept on wondering when will this book start telling us about the rest of America and how that came from Chicago. Eventually I realized I read the subtitle wrong. Instead of how Chicago changed America this book is really about show more how Chicago created its own version of the American Dream. If the subtitle had been “How Chicago Became Chicago” I would have been less misled and more comfortable. But enough about that.
I lived in Oak Park and worked on Miracle Mile for five years in the early 1990s. I grew up in New York City and I had to bite my tongue as my coworkers talked about how great Chicago was and how it was a “city that worked”. They clearly liked the place, as did I, but not with the same intensity. Before then I had visited Chicago several times, especially attending conventions and meetings enjoying great food, great architecture, strong ethnic neighborhoods, but could not forget the 1968 Democratic convention and Chicago’s history of terrible race relations, bad school system, public housing slums, segregation, and its history of organized crime. On the positive side there were many individuals who have made great achievements who called Chicago home, Mohammed Ali, Oprah Winfrey, Saul Bellow, Charlie Trotter, Hugh Hefner, and of course, Barack Obama. All of this I knew about before opening this book. I still have to say I learned a lot more by reading this book.
This book is organized historically. It starts with Pre-1945 and goes through 1960. The start is reasonable but why it stops at 1960 is not at all clear. For many people 1968 is the year they quickly associate with Chicago. Stopping in 1960 feels unfinished. Unfortunately how the author curated material is also problematic. Including Architecture, Music, Theater, Education, Race, Religion, Ethnicity, all make perfect sense. Including who was sleeping with whom makes for interesting reading but a bit questionable if the subject is what made Chicago, Chicago.
This book includes Mies von der Rohe, Moholy-Nagy, IIT, University of Chicago, Encyclopedia Britannica, Robert Hutchins, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, Dave Garroway, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Chess Records, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, Richard Daley and previous mayors, Hugh Hefner, and occasionally Frank Lloyd Wright. We learn lots of details about all of these that I never knew, especially Algren’s relation with Simone de Beauvoir, all well documented
Commerce is the big omission. McDonald’s and a minor player, the stockyards, make the cut. But missing are Sears, Montgomery Ward, International Harvester, Abbott Laboratories, Kraft, Morton’s Salt, Walgreen’s, Motorola, Zenith, Wrigley’s and even Marshall Fields department store. The author seems not to consider this side of Chicago at all. But they are central to Chicago so their omission says more about the author and what he considers interesting.
There are endnotes without numbers referencing them in the text making it easier to read the text. However the font used for the endnotes is so small they are essentially unreadable.
The book is a great read but if you want to fully understand Chicago it’s not sufficient. show less
I lived in Oak Park and worked on Miracle Mile for five years in the early 1990s. I grew up in New York City and I had to bite my tongue as my coworkers talked about how great Chicago was and how it was a “city that worked”. They clearly liked the place, as did I, but not with the same intensity. Before then I had visited Chicago several times, especially attending conventions and meetings enjoying great food, great architecture, strong ethnic neighborhoods, but could not forget the 1968 Democratic convention and Chicago’s history of terrible race relations, bad school system, public housing slums, segregation, and its history of organized crime. On the positive side there were many individuals who have made great achievements who called Chicago home, Mohammed Ali, Oprah Winfrey, Saul Bellow, Charlie Trotter, Hugh Hefner, and of course, Barack Obama. All of this I knew about before opening this book. I still have to say I learned a lot more by reading this book.
This book is organized historically. It starts with Pre-1945 and goes through 1960. The start is reasonable but why it stops at 1960 is not at all clear. For many people 1968 is the year they quickly associate with Chicago. Stopping in 1960 feels unfinished. Unfortunately how the author curated material is also problematic. Including Architecture, Music, Theater, Education, Race, Religion, Ethnicity, all make perfect sense. Including who was sleeping with whom makes for interesting reading but a bit questionable if the subject is what made Chicago, Chicago.
This book includes Mies von der Rohe, Moholy-Nagy, IIT, University of Chicago, Encyclopedia Britannica, Robert Hutchins, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, Dave Garroway, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Chess Records, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, Richard Daley and previous mayors, Hugh Hefner, and occasionally Frank Lloyd Wright. We learn lots of details about all of these that I never knew, especially Algren’s relation with Simone de Beauvoir, all well documented
Commerce is the big omission. McDonald’s and a minor player, the stockyards, make the cut. But missing are Sears, Montgomery Ward, International Harvester, Abbott Laboratories, Kraft, Morton’s Salt, Walgreen’s, Motorola, Zenith, Wrigley’s and even Marshall Fields department store. The author seems not to consider this side of Chicago at all. But they are central to Chicago so their omission says more about the author and what he considers interesting.
There are endnotes without numbers referencing them in the text making it easier to read the text. However the font used for the endnotes is so small they are essentially unreadable.
The book is a great read but if you want to fully understand Chicago it’s not sufficient. show less
I got this book because I enjoy reading historical fiction, particularly about the Civil War; and I also wanted to read it because of the tie-in to baseball. My father pitched in church league softball for years, and both my brothers played little league. One of my brothers played baseball in both high school and college and then continued on to Twilight league. I spent most of my childhood and much of my adult life following baseball games at one level or another of play. So, the idea of show more Confederates and Yankees meeting on a make-shift baseball field was interesting to me. This is not to imply, though, that any special knowledge of baseball or the Civil War is necessary to enjoying this book. It is riveting all on its own. Dyja has quite a story to tell, and he does it by taking a group of men of various backgrounds and merging them into a story about evaluating their own lives as well as what each of them comes to believe is his purpose as a soldier. The key moment for me was when one of the men, with more insight than is the norm, realizes that he is not in the war situation to win anything. He is there either to kill or be killed and that is all. For me, Dyja brilliantly makes the point that whether it's the war in Afghanistan or Iraq or the Civil War, war is war whatever century it takes place and no matter what men are forced to fight it. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys excellent writing and storytelling as well as what humanity is really all about. show less
Author Thomas Dyja contends that Chicago was a center of American culture – “a third coast” – during the first part of the 20th century (up until 1960). He cites the Chicago architectural tradition, headed by Louis Sullivan and Mies van der Rowe; the flourishing of early television, that produced Dave Garroway and Kukla, Fran and Ollie; writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Nelson Algren; and the city as the headquarters of blues, with Chess Records, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, show more and Sun Ra. He also cites two unknowns that flourished during the time, photographer Vivian Maier and collage artist/novelist Henry Darger. He’s somewhat more dubious about the city as the birthplace of Playboy and McDonald’s.
Dyja’s narrative focuses on biographies of his protagonists interspersed with regional, national and international events. I was surprised there was little mention of organized crime – something Chicago’s always been famous for (unless you count the political machine, which gets extensive coverage). Mayor Daley is credited/blamed for much of the demise of Chicago as a cultural center for allowing demolition of many of the city’s architectural landmarks and for using public housing to cement the city’s racial divide (despite being immensely popular with black voters. Well, he always got a lot of votes from black neighborhoods, anyway.) A second factor was the advent of extensive air transportation; you no longer had to change trains in Chicago and it became “flyover country”.
A pleasant read, and instructive; I’d never heard of Henry Darger. If anything, I think Dyja is a little too easy on the Democratic political machine; I lived in Chicago (although after the time period he covers) and I saw it in action. A plate section with appropriate photographs; maps, endnotes, bibliography and good index. show less
Dyja’s narrative focuses on biographies of his protagonists interspersed with regional, national and international events. I was surprised there was little mention of organized crime – something Chicago’s always been famous for (unless you count the political machine, which gets extensive coverage). Mayor Daley is credited/blamed for much of the demise of Chicago as a cultural center for allowing demolition of many of the city’s architectural landmarks and for using public housing to cement the city’s racial divide (despite being immensely popular with black voters. Well, he always got a lot of votes from black neighborhoods, anyway.) A second factor was the advent of extensive air transportation; you no longer had to change trains in Chicago and it became “flyover country”.
A pleasant read, and instructive; I’d never heard of Henry Darger. If anything, I think Dyja is a little too easy on the Democratic political machine; I lived in Chicago (although after the time period he covers) and I saw it in action. A plate section with appropriate photographs; maps, endnotes, bibliography and good index. show less
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- Works
- 12
- Members
- 721
- Popularity
- #35,209
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 13
- ISBNs
- 36