The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream

by Thomas L. Dyja

Overview

 Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland Prize

A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture
 
Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America—from Chess Records to Playboy, McDonald’s to the University of Chicago. Populated with an incredible cast of characters, including Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Sun Ra, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Turkel, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, The Third Coast recalls the prominence of the Windy City in all its grandeur.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101605486
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/18/2013
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	544
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Thomas Dyja is the author of three novels and two works of nonfiction. A native of Chicago’s Northwest Side, he was once called “a real Chicago boy” by Studs Turkel. He now lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

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. His last designs had been a series of extravagant little banks in midwestern hamlets, jewel boxes cascading with his glorious ornament, but they’d paid nothing, so old friends like his former protégé Frank Lloyd Wright had chipped in for this dingy room. As the bulb swung and his breathing shallowed, Chicagoans went on shopping in his department stores, cooking dinner in his homes, shuffling papers in his offices, dozing off in his theaters, and praying in the churches he’d created. Few had any clue how Sullivan had given form to the functions of their lives.

 

He’d come to Chicago in 1873, chased west by the year’s financial panic to a city whose purpose was to be in the middle. Before Marquette and Joliet came through in the late 1600s, centuries of Potawatomi Indians had portaged here between Lake Michigan and the Des Plaines River, paddling on to the Mississippi. French fur traders set up shop in the 1700s, and as the railroads pushed west in the next century, the frontier outpost named Fort Dearborn grew into Chicago, hub of the expanding nation. From every direction, people, resources, and products moved through its muddy plains, soon the site of the world’s biggest, wildest boomtown, and when the fire of 1871 scoured most of the city away, America willed it back into existence, this time even bigger and wilder. Between 1870 and 1890, the city’s population grew from just under 300,000 to more than a million souls densely packed and separate, every person there to do, to make, to somehow get theirs. Grain and livestock mattered as much as pig iron; labor confronted capital; new sciences were explored amid back- alley violence. “Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again,” said an uncharacteristically prim Rudyard Kipling after an 1890 visit. “It is inhabited by savages.” Historian William Cronon has called it “the grandest, most spectacular country fair the world has ever seen.” You could probably find fifty just like it now in China, but Chicago was the first of its kind, and Louis Sullivan had loved it at first sight. “Here . . . was power,” he wrote, “naked power, naked as the prairies, greater than the mountains.”

 

After a short stint at the École des Beaux- Arts in Paris, Sullivan teamed up with Dankmar Adler to design scores of buildings that expressed the extremes of the city that gave America its meat, steel, and the Wizard of Oz. Together Sullivan and Adler refined the idea of what a skyscraper should be. They pushed the limits of technology in buildings such as the Auditorium and the Schiller Theater, while Sullivan developed his distinctive ornamentation, an intricate, organic system that wound around the straight lines of modern industry, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of a grain of wheat the way Bach explored music. Sullivan’s florid yet rational ornament mediated between Chicagoans and their buildings. It captured the creative tension between rural and urban, past and present, the individual man and the democratic nation that fueled the city. Sullivan gave form to the idea of Chicago as a crossroads, where all of America’s impulses met to converse and trade, battle and build, each structure a message about how technology and man could thrive together. The Columbian Exposition of 1893 ended all that, though. Grand as Daniel Burnham’s fair was, it pushed the first generation of Chicago skyscraper builders out of fashion, and the city’s progress stumbled. Adler and Sullivan split, and as Sullivan took to the bottle, he warned— or cursed— that it would be fifty years before American architecture recovered. He was off by only five or so.

 

When Sullivan died that night in 1924, he died forgotten. Chicago was no longer his city, as much as it ever had been. In the 1920s virtually everyone went on the take— not just Al Capone but union bosses and corporate heads, aldermen and corner cops; even a few priests were mobsters under the Roman collar. Five years later the stock market crash would drag the city to the brink of collapse.

 

Out of those ashes, Chicago did rise again. It was a slow, often painful progress infused with creativity and greed, overshadowed by the two glamorous cities on the other coasts, but central in all ways to the massmarket America we know today. Beginning in the late 1930s and rolling on through the 1950s, Chicagoans produced much of what the world now calls “American”: the liberated, leering sexuality of Playboy; glass and steel modern architecture; rock and roll and the urban blues; McDonald’s and the spread of the fast- food nation; the improvisational sketch comedy that’s trained everyone from Joan Rivers and John Belushi to Steve Carell and Tina Fey; Ebony magazine and Emmett Till, whose murder catalyzed the civil rights movement; geodesic domes; avant-garde jazz and gospel music; the Nation of Islam; modern photography; the atom bomb and the Great Books; Kukla, Fran and Ollie; and the last great political machine.

 

The Third Coast is the history of Chicago’s greatest— and final— period as the nation’s primary meeting place, market, workshop, and lab, but it is also the story of how America’s uniform culture came to be. As New York positioned itself on the global stage and Hollywood polished the nation’s fantasies, the most profound aspects of American modernity grew up out of the flat, prairie land next to Lake Michigan. The real struggle for America’s future— whether it would be directed by its people or its institutions— took place in postwar Chicago.

Table of Contents

Maps xiv-xix

Preface xxi

Part 1 Pre-1945

Chapter 1 The Brick Is Another Teacher 3

Chapter 2 We Were Part of Them 23

Chapter 3 Washed Up on a Favorable Shore 41

Chapter 4 The Ideal World of Mr. Hutchins 60

Part 2 1945-1949

Chapter 5 The Chaos of Our Conceptions 75

Chapter 6 Believers in the City 94

Chapter 7 A Discovered Beauty 101

Chapter 8 Until My Change Comes 111

Chapter 9 A Local Youth in Love 117

Chapter 10 Let Me Do One by Myself 130

Chapter 11 A Fresh Time 144

Chapter 12 The Balance of Power 138

Chapter 13 This Program Came to You from Chicago 168

Chapter 14 A City of Slightbrows 180

Part 3 1950-1954

Chapter 15 Stand Up and Be Counted 199

Chapter 16 Living Separate Lives 206

Chapter 17 Nobody Knows My Name 220

Chapter 18 The Lonely Crowd 237

Chapter 19 Convention Summer 245

Chapter 20 Playwrights and Playboys 254

Chapter 21 Chicagsky Temp 265

Part 4 1955

Chapter 22 A Family Man for a' Family City 281

Chapter 23 The Blues Have a Baby 290

Chapter 24 American Hungers 296

Chapter 25 Theater Without Heroes 305

Chapter 26 What Kind of World Do We Live In? 312

Chapter 27 We Like It This Way 323

Part 5 1956-1960

Chapter 28 Chicago Dynamic 331

Chapter 29 Beta People for a Beta World 344

Chapter 30 Gaining a Moon and Losing Ourselves 355

Chapter 31 Will Somebody Please Listen to Me Today! 363

Chapter 32 The Realm of the Unreal 378

Epilogue: In Chicago for My Forever 404

Acknowledgments 413

Notes 417

Sources 463

Index 489

Credits 507

What People are Saying About This

Kurt Andersen

I am an American, not Chicago-born, but at age nine Chicago was the first big city I visited, and it was love at first sight. I've come to know it deeply, however, only through its writers: Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Mike Royko—and now Thomas Dyja. The Third Coast is a vivid, fascinating, surprising, altogether masterful chronicle of this quintessentially American city's mid-century cultural heyday.
—Kurt Andersen (author of True Believers)

Douglas Brinkley

Thomas Dyja's The Third Coast unravels the wondrous history of Chicago with cunning and aplomb. Every aspect of the Windy City is revealed anew from Mies van der Rohe's skyscrapers to Chuck Berry's rock n' roll. A truly gripping narrative. Highly recommended!
—Douglas Brinkley (author of Cronkite)

Edward Glaeser

Thomas Dyja has written a wonderful book about the cultural cauldron that seethed in 20th century Chicago. The Third Coast reminds us that New York and Los Angeles hold no monopoly on American artistic genius. From Louis Sullivan to Richard Wright, from Mahalia Jackson to Nelson Algren, Chicago attracted and inspired talent. Dyja's well-crafted exploration of Chicago creativity helps us understand why cities are the wellsprings of culture. American society was molded by its cities, and Chicago has played an outsized role in molding music and literature and architecture. Dyja's engaging writing not only provides an insightful investigation of Chicago's cultural heroes, but also delivers a broader view of how cities shape the sea of civilization.
—Edward Glaeser (author of Triumph of the City)

Scott Turow

Engrossing, wide-angled… an intensely engaging book, notable for its intellectual breadth, arms-wide research and high-octane prose that keeps it riding high over the mass of details. —Scott Turow

Michael Kimmelman

Thomas Dyja's The Third Coast is a wonderful, beautifully-written, eye-opener and genuine page-turner about Chicago, as sweeping and astonishing as the city itself. It does nothing less than help rewrite postwar American history and culture and cure our bi-coastal myopia. It links half-a-century's worth of economic and social changes with cultural revolution, racial strife with sexual upheaval, architecture with politics, literature with gospel music, Hugh Hefner with Tina Fey, Mies van der Rohe with Mayor Daley, Ray Kroc with Katherine Kuh—it's the whole grand, messy American story, lived through bigger-than-life in a bigger-than-life city. —Michael Kimmelman (author of The Accidental Masterpiece)

From the Publisher

Chicago Tribune:
"The Third Coast is deeply researched, thoroughly thought-out, exquisitely structured and beautifully written — an essential for any lover of Chicago and American history.”

Scott Turow, The New York Times:
"An intensely engaging book, notable for its intellectual breadth, arms-wide research and [the] high-octane prose that keeps it riding high..."
 
New York Times Book Review (cover):
"[A] robust cultural history… Dyja zooms in on the qualities Chicagoans value and does it better than anyone else I've read."

Vanity Fair:
"A rollicking cultural history… What's a given now was often given by Chicago: high-rises, gospel and the blues, TV talk shows, Playboy, McDonalds, sketch comedy…Was it all dazzling coincidence or, as Dyja suggests, something in the water?"

Chicago Tribune:
"The Third Coast… has an elegant, unflinching, non-nostalgic clarity… a new touchstone in Chicago literature… an ambitious history lesson no one had written."

Seattle Times:
"My God, how I enjoyed this book… The Third Coast offers a deeper perspective, detailing Chicago’s midcentury contributions to literature, music, theater, photography, television and architecture… The book is an extraordinarily good read, with writing that sparkles."

The Huntington News: "An exceedingly entertaining book...The Third Coast is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand Chicago — and by extension the creation of post WWII urban America. On top of that, it's supremely readable. An unbeatable combination."

Booklist (starred review):
"[A] robust, outspoken, zestfully knowledgeable, and seductively told synthesis of biography, culture, politics, and history…[written] with velocity, wry wit, and tough lyricism… Dyja focuses on the years between the Great Depression and 1960... As vibrant and clarifying as his overarching vision is, what makes this such a thrilling read are Dyja’s fresh and dynamic portraits not only of the first Mayor Daley and his machine but also of key artists and innovators who embodied or amplified Chicago’s earthiness, grit, audacity, and beauty… from the city’s epic political corruption, vicious racism, and ethnic enclaves to the ferment that gave rise to world-changing architecture, urban blues and gospel, McDonald’s, improv comedy, and the 'birth of television.' Here is the frenetic simultaneity of an evolving city torn between its tragic crimes and failings and tensile strength and creativity."

Publishers Weekly (starred):
"A magisterial narrative of mid-20th century Chicago... a luminous, empathetic, and engrossing portrait of a city."
  
Kirkus Reviews:
"A readable, richly detailed history of America's second city-which, laments novelist/historian and Chicagoan Dyja has become a third city, perhaps even less. A valuable contribution to the history of Chicago, worthy of a place alongside William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis."

Kurt Andersen, author of True Believers:
"I am an American, not Chicago-born, but at age nine Chicago was the first big city I visited, and it was love at first sight. I've come to know it deeply, however, only through its writers: Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Mike Royko—and now Thomas Dyja. The Third Coast is a vivid, fascinating, surprising, altogether masterful chronicle of this quintessentially American city's mid-century cultural heyday."

Anthony Heilbut, author of Exiled in Paradise and The Fan Who Knew Too Much:
"This is a book as startling as the place it celebrates: Chicago, the town where a gay puppeteer transformed children's television and thereby, their imagination; the burg where post-war comedy, cuisine, urban politics, and pre-marital sex were all changed, changed utterly. Dyja gives unforgettable voice to dozens of out-sized personalities, from Sun Ra to Studs Terkel, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Nelson Algren, from Mahalia Jackson to Muddy Waters, from Richard Daley to Adlai Stevenson, a cast worthy of a Tolstoy or Dickens. In his wonderful book, Chicago stands revealed as both America's most corrupt city and its one, true homeland of the soul."

Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City:
"Thomas Dyja has written a wonderful book about the cultural cauldron that seethed in 20th century Chicago. The Third Coast reminds us that New York and Los Angeles hold no monopoly on American artistic genius. From Louis Sullivan to Richard Wright, from Mahalia Jackson to Nelson Algren, Chicago attracted and inspired talent. Dyja's well-crafted exploration of Chicago creativity helps us understand why cities are the wellsprings of culture. American society was molded by its cities, and Chicago has played an outsized role in molding music and literature and architecture. Dyja's engaging writing not only provides an insightful investigation of Chicago's cultural heroes, but also delivers a broader view of how cities shape the sea of civilization."

Michael Kimmelman, author of The Accidental Masterpiece:

Editorial Reviews

…Thomas Dyja's engrossing, wide-angled cultural history of Chicago in the middle of the 20th century…makes for an intensely engaging book, notable for its intellectual breadth, arms-wide research and high-octane prose that keeps it riding high over the mass of details…Like all good histories, the book is crammed with tasty morsels…More important, Mr. Dyja repeatedly presents a nuanced understanding that counterbalances many of today's convenient preconceptions.

The New York Times - Scott Turow

Thomas Dyja's robust cultural history, The Third Coast, weaves together the stories of the American artists, styles and ideas that developed in Chicago before and after World War II—the blues, Mies van der Rohe's Modernist architecture, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, and "Kukla, Fran and Ollie"…Dyja zooms in on the qualities Chicagoans value and does it better than anyone else I've read: informality; the desire to be "regular"; the conviction among artists that "the process was as important as the product."

The New York Times Book Review - Rachel Shteir

Novelist and Chicago native Dyja (Play for a Kingdom) delivers a magisterial narrative of mid-20th century Chicago, once America’s “primary meeting place, market, workshop and lab.” Dyja covers the period from the 1930s through the 1950s, when Chicago produced much of what became postwar America’s way of life: Mies van der Rohe’s glass and steel skyscrapers; TV’s soap operas; Ray Kroc’s McDonald’s franchise; Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire; and the Chess Brothers’ recording studio that unleashed Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, urban blues, and rock ’n’ roll. Though the book focuses on Chicago’s pivotal role in producing America’s mass-market culture, Dyja highlights how Chicago was also wrestling with the counterculture—the improvisational theater of Second City, the urban poor in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry and Nelson Algren’s novels, Moholy’s experimental Institute of Design, and new styles in television and music aimed at people, not markets. As Dyja notes, racial strife pervaded all aspects of life in the city, which was home to the National Baptist Convention; the Harlem Globetrotters; major black press outlets (Ebony and Jet, among others); and Emmett Till, whose murder sparked the Civil Rights movement. Dyja explores Chicago’s politics, and how the city’s leadership attempted to address the “racial wound,” caused, in part, by placing all public housing in black neighborhoods. What emerges is a luminous, empathetic, and engrossing portrait of a city. Agent: Lisa Bankoff, ICM. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Robust, outspoken, zestfully knowledgeable, and seductively told…Writing with velocity, wry wit, and tough lyricism in sync with Chicago’s ‘ballsy’ spirit, Dyja focuses on the years between the Great Depression and 1960…As vibrant and clarifying as his overarching vision is, what makes this such a thrilling read are Dyja’s fresh and dynamic portraits not only of the first Mayor Daley and his machine but also of key artists and innovators who embodied or amplified Chicago’s earthiness, grit, audacity, and beauty…Here is the frenetic simultaneity of an evolving city torn between its tragic crimes and failings and tensile strength and creativity.”

Booklist (starred review)

This is a book as startling as the place it celebrates: Chicago, the town where a gay puppeteer transformed children’s television and, thereby, their imagination; the burg where postwar comedy, cuisine, urban politics, and premarital sex were all changed, changed utterly. Dyja gives unforgettable voice to dozens of out-sized personalities, from Sun Ra to Studs Terkel, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Nelson Algren, from Mahalia Jackson to Muddy Waters, from Richard Daley to Adlai Stevenson, a cast worthy of a Tolstoy or Dickens. In his wonderful book, Chicago stands revealed as both America’s most corrupt city and its one, true homeland of the soul.”

author of Exiled in Paradise and The Fan Who Knew Anthony Heilbut

My God, how I enjoyed this book…[Dyja] offers up Chicago in full…The book is an extraordinarily good read, with writing that sparkles.”

Seattle Times

In The Third Coast, Thomas Dyja chronicles Chicago’s estimable contributions to American culture with the colorful prose of Nelson Algren and the humanistic wisdom of Studs Terkel. He puts you at street level with the men and women whose talent and entrepreneurial chutzpah combined to give Chicago, and the nation, its postwar swagger.”

Bob Marovich

While most of the American cultural experience focuses on what comes out of New York and Hollywood, it’s important to remember the Midwestern colossus that hoisted the nation on its shoulders: Chicago. This book recounts the history of the Windy City after WWII and how it gave birth to a unique artistic style and the Daley political machine. Narrator David Drummond has exactly the right voice to carry this book: deep, bold, and elastic. He doesn’t attempt any characters but he gives the words a life and heft that reflect the author’s point about Chicago being an important player in America’s modern story.”

AudioFile

Thomas Dyja has written a wonderful book about the cultural cauldron that seethed in twentieth-century Chicago. The Third Coast reminds us that New York and Los Angeles hold no monopoly on American artistic genius. From Louis Sullivan to Richard Wright, from Mahalia Jackson to Nelson Algren, Chicago attracted and inspired talent. Dyja’s well-crafted exploration of Chicago creativity helps us understand why cities are the wellsprings of culture. American society was molded by its cities, and Chicago has played an outsized role in molding music and literature and architecture. Dyja’s engaging writing not only provides an insightful investigation of Chicago’s cultural heroes but also delivers a broader view of how cities shape the sea of civilization.”

New York Times bestselling author Edward Glaeser

"[A] robust cultural history…Dyja zooms in on the qualities Chicagoans value and does it better than anyone else I’ve read.”

New York Times Book Review

A rollicking cultural history…What’s a given now was often given by Chicago: high-rises, gospel and the blues, TV talk shows, Playboy, McDonalds, sketch comedy…Was it all dazzling coincidence or, as Dyja suggests, something in the water?”

Vanity Fair

Thomas Dyja’s The Third Coast is a wonderful, beautifully written eye-opener and genuine page-turner about Chicago, as sweeping and astonishing as the city itself. It does nothing less than help rewrite postwar American history and culture and cure our bicoastal myopia. It links half a century’s worth of economic and social changes with cultural revolution, racial strife with sexual upheaval, architecture with politics, literature with gospel music, Hugh Hefner with Tina Fey, Mies van der Rohe with Mayor Daley, Ray Kroc with Katherine Kuh—it’s the whole, grand, messy American story, lived through bigger-than-life in a bigger-than-life city.”

New York Times bestselling author Michael Kimmelman

Thomas Dyja’s The Third Coast unravels the wondrous history of Chicago with cunning and aplomb. Every aspect of the Windy City is revealed anew from Mies van der Rohe’s skyscrapers to Chuck Berry’s rock ’n’ roll. A truly gripping narrative. Highly recommended!”

New York Times bestselling author Douglas Brinkley

"The Third Coast has an elegant, unflinching, non-nostalgic clarity…a new touchstone in Chicago literature…an ambitious history lesson no one had written.”

Chicago Tribune

Engrossing…This gallery of vivid portraits makes for an intensely engaging book, notable for its intellectual breadth, arms-wide research, and high-octane prose that keeps it riding high over the mass of details…Like all good histories, the book is crammed with tasty morsels…More important, Mr. Dyja repeatedly presents a nuanced understanding that counterbalances many of today’s convenient preconceptions.”

New York Times bestselling author Scott Turow

I am an American, not Chicago-born, but at age nine Chicago was the first big city I visited, and it was love at first sight. I’ve come to know it deeply, however, only through its writers: Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Mike Royko—and now Thomas Dyja. The Third Coast is a vivid, fascinating, surprising, altogether masterful chronicle of this quintessentially American city’s mid-century cultural heyday.”

New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen

Chicago Tribune:
"The Third Coast is deeply researched, thoroughly thought-out, exquisitely structured and beautifully written — an essential for any lover of Chicago and American history.”

Scott Turow, The New York Times:
"An intensely engaging book, notable for its intellectual breadth, arms-wide research and [the] high-octane prose that keeps it riding high..."
 
New York Times Book Review (cover):
"[A] robust cultural history… Dyja zooms in on the qualities Chicagoans value and does it better than anyone else I've read."

Vanity Fair:
"A rollicking cultural history… What's a given now was often given by Chicago: high-rises, gospel and the blues, TV talk shows, Playboy, McDonalds, sketch comedy…Was it all dazzling coincidence or, as Dyja suggests, something in the water?"

Chicago Tribune:
"The Third Coast… has an elegant, unflinching, non-nostalgic clarity… a new touchstone in Chicago literature… an ambitious history lesson no one had written."

Seattle Times:
"My God, how I enjoyed this book… The Third Coast offers a deeper perspective, detailing Chicago’s midcentury contributions to literature, music, theater, photography, television and architecture… The book is an extraordinarily good read, with writing that sparkles."

The Huntington News:"An exceedingly entertaining book...The Third Coast is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand Chicago — and by extension the creation of post WWII urban America. On top of that, it's supremely readable. An unbeatable combination."

Booklist (starred review):
"[A] robust, outspoken, zestfully knowledgeable, and seductively told synthesis of biography, culture, politics, and history…[written] with velocity, wry wit, and tough lyricism… Dyja focuses on the years between the Great Depression and 1960... As vibrant and clarifying as his overarching vision is, what makes this such a thrilling read are Dyja’s fresh and dynamic portraits not only of the first Mayor Daley and his machine but also of key artists and innovators who embodied or amplified Chicago’s earthiness, grit, audacity, and beauty… from the city’s epic political corruption, vicious racism, and ethnic enclaves to the ferment that gave rise to world-changing architecture, urban blues and gospel, McDonald’s, improv comedy, and the 'birth of television.' Here is the frenetic simultaneity of an evolving city torn between its tragic crimes and failings and tensile strength and creativity."

Publishers Weekly (starred):
"A magisterial narrative of mid-20th century Chicago... a luminous, empathetic, and engrossing portrait of a city."
  
Kirkus Reviews:
"A readable, richly detailed history of America's second city-which, laments novelist/historian and Chicagoan Dyja has become a third city, perhaps even less. A valuable contribution to the history of Chicago, worthy of a place alongside William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis."

Kurt Andersen, author of True Believers:
"I am an American, not Chicago-born, but at age nine Chicago was the first big city I visited, and it was love at first sight. I've come to know it deeply, however, only through its writers: Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Mike Royko—and now Thomas Dyja. The Third Coast is a vivid, fascinating, surprising, altogether masterful chronicle of this quintessentially American city's mid-century cultural heyday."

Anthony Heilbut, author of Exiled in Paradise and The Fan Who Knew Too Much:
"This is a book as startling as the place it celebrates: Chicago, the town where a gay puppeteer transformed children's television and thereby, their imagination; the burg where post-war comedy, cuisine, urban politics, and pre-marital sex were all changed, changed utterly. Dyja gives unforgettable voice to dozens of out-sized personalities, from Sun Ra to Studs Terkel, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Nelson Algren, from Mahalia Jackson to Muddy Waters, from Richard Daley to Adlai Stevenson, a cast worthy of a Tolstoy or Dickens. In his wonderful book, Chicago stands revealed as both America's most corrupt city and its one, true homeland of the soul."

Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City:
"Thomas Dyja has written a wonderful book about the cultural cauldron that seethed in 20th century Chicago. The Third Coast reminds us that New York and Los Angeles hold no monopoly on American artistic genius. From Louis Sullivan to Richard Wright, from Mahalia Jackson to Nelson Algren, Chicago attracted and inspired talent. Dyja's well-crafted exploration of Chicago creativity helps us understand why cities are the wellsprings of culture. American society was molded by its cities, and Chicago has played an outsized role in molding music and literature and architecture. Dyja's engaging writing not only provides an insightful investigation of Chicago's cultural heroes, but also delivers a broader view of how cities shape the sea of civilization."

Michael Kimmelman, author of The Accidental Masterpiece:
"Thomas Dyja's The Third Coast is a wonderful, beautifully-written, eye-opener and genuine page-turner about Chicago, as sweeping and astonishing as the city itself. It does nothing less than help rewrite postwar American history and culture and cure our bi-coastal myopia. It links half-a-century's worth of economic and social changes with cultural revolution, racial strife with sexual upheaval, architecture with politics, literature with gospel music, Hugh Hefner with Tina Fey, Mies van der Rohe with Mayor Daley, Ray Kroc with Katherine Kuh—it's the whole grand, messy American story, lived through bigger-than-life characters in a bigger-than-life city."

Bob Marovich, Host of "Gospel Memories," WLUW Chicago:
"In The Third Coast, Thomas Dyja chronicles Chicago's estimable contributions to American culture with the colorful prose of Nelson Algren and the humanistic wisdom of Studs Terkel. He puts you at street level with the men and women whose talent and entrepreneurial chutzpah combined to give Chicago, and the nation, its postwar swagger."

Douglas Brinkley, author of Cronkite:
"Thomas Dyja's The Third Coast unravels the wondrous history of Chicago with cunning and aplomb. Every aspect of the Windy City is revealed anew from Mies van der Rohe's skyscrapers to Chuck Berry's rock n' roll. A truly gripping narrative. Highly recommended!"

From the Publisher

It also has an elegant, unflinching, non-nostalgic clarity about Chicago that you rarely see in books about Chicago. It gave me a dizzying rush, the impression that I had come across a new touchstone in Chicago literature, an ambitious history lesson no one had written: The story of how, from 1945 to 1960, Chicago created the culture that shaped American culture, delivering, in that brief window, Studs Terkel, McDonald's, Hugh Hefner, the atom bomb, modernist architecture, Chess Records, The Second City, the Chicago School of Television and "Kukla, Fran and Ollie."

Chicago Tribune

While most of the American cultural experience focuses on what comes out of New York and Hollywood, it’s important to remember the Midwestern colossus that hoisted the nation on its shoulders: Chicago. This book recounts the history of the Windy City after WWII and how it gave birth to a unique artistic style and the Daley political machine. Narrator David Drummond has exactly the right voice to carry this book: deep, bold, and elastic. He doesn’t attempt any characters but he gives the words a life and heft that reflect the author’s point about Chicago being an important player in America’s modern story. There are times when Drummond’s voice becomes stuck in a limited range, but he’s able to break out of it to avoid tedium. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2013 - AudioFile

A readable, richly detailed history of America's second city--which, laments novelist/historian and Chicagoan Dyja (Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America, 2008, etc.), has become a third city, perhaps even less. One reason: Until the very end of the 1950s, most people traveling from coast to coast did so by way of Chicago, where they changed trains and often spent a little layover time. On January 25, 1959, all that changed when transcontinental air service was inaugurated between New York and Los Angeles, making Chicago and the rest of the land "flyover country"; as Dyja laments, "the newly minted ‘jet set' would never need to change trains in Chicago again." Nevertheless, Chicago remained an innovator on several cultural and commercial fronts, the home of Playboy magazine and Chess Records, even as it settled into the strange boss politics of Richard Daley, whose rise to power Dyja carefully records. Daley wielded that power in ways that a modern tyrant might envy, using what came to be known as "The Machine" to capture the minority vote that had become important by the 1950s after the explosive growth of the nonwhite population as a result of immigration and internal migration. However, writes Dyja, it was just one node of power, the other two central ones being the Catholic Church and organized crime, all working against each other as they "protected their power above the needs of the people they served." In the end, Los Angeles and other cities stole much of Chicago's thunder, and Chicago "never became the city it could have been, the city it should have been." A valuable contribution to the history of Chicago, worthy of a place alongside William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (1991).

Kirkus Reviews