Issue link: http://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/52531
style's sleek horizontal massing and subtly integrated ornament might best be displayed in his 1909 Robie House, which stands in the city's Hyde Park neighbourhood, on the South Side near the University of Chicago. By an uncanny coincidence, Oak Park was also the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, who did for American prose what Wright had done for its buildings. "Prose is architecture, not interior decoration," Hemingway once said, "and the baroque is over." Oddly, the author known for his stoic, hard-boiled persona also remarked that he "never thought Chicago was a tough place," an opinion that ran contrary to the mob-and-machine-gun image of the city that prevailed in his day. Either as a birthplace or inspiration, Chicago has spawned more than a few important American writers – Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser – but the one who most succinctly captured the feeling of the city's working- class neighborhoods was James T Farrell, whose 1930s Studs Lonigan trilogy cut to the heart of ethnic clannishness in a city that had absorbed wave upon wave of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Germany, and nearly every other European nation. Chicago's biggest influx of all, though, came from within the US. This was the great migration of African-Americans from the southern states, who fled north in the early 20th century to seek industrial jobs and escape the institutional racism of the South. The new black Chicagoans brought little with them in the way of personal possessions, but they did bring the Blues – that doleful creation of the Mississippi Delta which they electrified and sent around the world as the Chicago Blues. Without Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Buddy Guy, Keith Richards would never have become, well, Keith Richards. In the early 1980s, it was one of the city's sprawling South Side African-American neighborhoods that attracted the attention of an idealistic young Columbia University graduate named Barack Obama. Inspired by the election of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington, the young man who had until then spent his life abroad and in white America found a new place in his role with the Developing Communities Project, helping residents of public housing projects in the South Side. "I wasn't born here. . . I was born travel&living 75