October cities: The redevelopment of urban literature

In the 1950s and 1960s, dramatically transformed American cities presented a new set of formal and social problems to the people who considered it their business to write about cities. These urban intellectuals set out in various ways, and often at cross purposes, to make a new cultural map of the inner city.;October Cities examines bodies of writing that converge on three neighborhoods in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, showing how urban literature engaged with a fundamental succession in American urban life: the passing of the nineteenth-century industrial city and the emergence of the post-WWII metropolis of suburbs and inner city. The post-WWII city was shaped by two great folk migrations--from the South to the urban North and from the inner cities to the suburbs--and by the reconfiguration of inner cities along post-industrial lines that yielded a distinctive post-war social landscape of housing projects, expressways, monumental downtown redevelopment, and reordered ethnic and racial arrangements.;October Cities shows how various texts--novels, short stories, and poems, journalistic and scholarly analyses, city planning documents, statements of policy--map changing urban terrains and people them with shifting casts of representative characters, assemble narratives of decline and succession, consider the credentials and responsibilities of urban intellectuals, and otherwise evolve ways to represent the city in transition.;October Cities makes extended analyses of novels by Nelson Algren, Jack Dunphy, William Gardner Smith, David Bradley, and Warren Miller, as well as Claude Brown's autobiography Manchild in the Promised Land. Together, and in combination with a variety of satellite texts, these works narrate an epic of urban change and enact a literary succession: from the decline of urban literary realism on the pre-war model exemplified by Algren's Chicago tradition to the rise of a new generation of ghetto narratives exemplified by Brown's Manchild. Together, they outline a post-WWII urban crisis consisting of parallel upheavals in the city of fact--the changing cities themselves--and in the city of feeling assembled by American culture.