Good Sentences: Chicago (July 2024)
One of the most common places where University of Michigan Law School graduates end up—or at least spend some significant time—is Chicago. So we thought we’d devote this month’s issue of Good Sentences to that wonderful (and windy) city.
Enjoy!
—The Good Sentences Team
1. Poetry: Chicago by Carl Sandburg (1914)
Favorite Lines:
“And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back/the sneer and say to them:/ Come and show me another city with lifted head signing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”
—Picked by Marie Sheehan, Class of 2022 (Favorite Chicago Breakfast Spot: Bennison’s Bakery)
2. Fiction: The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
Favorite Sentence: “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”
—Picked by Isha Abbasi, Class of 2022 (Favorite Chicago Lunch Spot: Velvet Taco)
3. Essay: Jane Addams: A Hero for Our Time by Peter Gibbon (2021)
Favorite Sentence: “She believed in self-discovery, self-discipline, and self-improvement.”
—Picked by Muskan Sharma, Class of 2025 (Favorite Chicago Dinner Spot: Fig and Olive)
Michigan Sentences: Here’s an article about a new class at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy taught by the former mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot.
Former Chicago Mayor to Return to U-M as Visiting Professor (2024)
Sample: “Lightfoot, a 1984 U-M graduate, will co-teach a strategic public policy consulting class with Jeffrey Morenoff. The course will pair graduate students with social impact not-for-profit organizations in Chicago and Michigan to solve challenges those groups are facing in the delivery of services in their respective communities.”
Syllabus Sentences: Here’s a chapter I give students to help them understand the value of “late bloomers.” It talks about a number of writers whose literary careers didn’t really take off until they were well past 50, including the author of A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean. Maclean received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1940 and then taught in the English department there for several decades.
“Air Maclean” (Syntax of Sports: Volume 3)
Sample: “Miguel de Cervantes was 58 when the first volume of Don Quixote came out, and Laura Ingalls Wilder was even older when she started the series Little House on the Prairie. She was 63.
But that’s still over a decade younger than Norman Maclean was when he published A River Runs Through It, a wonderful novella about fly-fishing. He didn’t begin working on that book until he retired from teaching at the University of Chicago, where one of his students was actually John Paul Stevens, the future Supreme Court justice.”
Note: A glowing profile of Maclean appeared in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Here’s the opening paragraph: “When I am stuck on something I’m trying to write and have exhausted all the other options—ignoring the problem, staring blankly at the problem, moving the problem around to see if it’s less annoying in some other location, eating all the chocolate in the house—I eventually do what I should have done in the first place and go read some writer who is much better at this business than I am. The candidates are legion. But, from the whole long, idiosyncratic list of authors I regularly turn to for intellectual and aesthetic resuscitation, one of the most consistently useful is Norman Maclean.”
Book Recommendations
For good sentences in a novel about Chicago
Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
Sample: “He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to.”
For good sentences in a book of poems about Chicago
A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)
Sample: “The Old Marrieds”
“But in the crowding darkness not a word did they say.
Though the pretty-coated birds had piped so lightly all the day.
And he had seen the lovers in the little side streets.
And she had heard the morning stories clogged with sweets.
It was quite a time for loving. It was midnight. It was May.
But in the crowding darkness not a word did they say.”
For good sentences in a history of Chicago
The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream by Thomas Dyja (2011)
Sample: “Under the light of a single bulb, the old drunk slipped into a coma. Louis Sullivan, the greatest architect in a city of great architecture, lay dying of kidney disease at the Warner Hotel on 33rd and Cottage Grove, five years after the White Sox had met there to fix the 1919 World Series.”
Quick Tip
Here’s a quick tip about a writing issue that can unfortunately lead to a lot of unnecessarily long sentences and paragraphs: being “uselessly accurate.”
