Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition continues to haunt the public and literary imagination. A temporary but massive “city” built in a single park, the Fair was part of a larger sociocultural trend of nineteenth-century exhibitions. This chapter focuses on some of the fiction set at the Chicago Fair, those contemporaneous works written and published around 1893, often by authors who attended the Fair themselves. The temporal proximity of this literature to the event itself provides a useful way to gain insight into the quotidian experiences of tourists to the Fair. Many scholars have looked at these literary works in depth, but my own entanglement with the literary fair is framed by my 2007 and 2008 archaeological survey and excavation of Chicago’s Jackson Park, the former site of the Fair. Although some of the physical remains of the Fair linger into the present, albeit in ruined or heavily modified forms, novels from the Fair addressed the reality that the Fair, though immense, was designed to be temporary. Finally, a look at a more recent wave of literature on the Fair points to the continued interest in and expressive power of the Fair into the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the two Chicago-set graphic novels of Chris Ware entitled Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) and Building Stories (2012), as well as Lost Buildings (2004), Ware’s “on-stage radio & picture collaboration” with Ira Glass for National Public Radio. The chapter argues that Ware’s body of work explores how various human networks engage with the storied history and urban geography of his adopted city, and that it does so in endlessly experimental ways that have continued to redefine the expressive potential of the comics form. In these works, Ware creates complex visual narratives in which the city and its ever-changing urban landscape is often as much of a character as the people inhabiting it, and his meticulously drawn pages are thus an attempt not only to depict and make sense of Chicago but also to create a visual index of the relationship between its spatial and emotional lives. Despite his untraditional choice of form, this approach places him in a lineage of Chicago writers that reaches all the way back to the earliest recorders of life in the city.