Greg Holden is the kind of guy who spends vacation time hunting down the homes of his favorite authors–Hemingway’s house in Key West, Faulkner’s estate in Mississippi.
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Along with the usual suspects–Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hemingway, Bellow, Sandburg–Holden covers the haunts of writers such as Edna Ferber, Poetry magazine’s Harriet Monroe, Charles MacArthur, Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, and playwright Lorraine Hansberry. He includes Hansberry’s home at 5330 S. Calumet, where she lived from 1930 to ’38, as part of a driving tour of the Washington Park neighborhood where James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy takes place. He also covers more contemporary scribes, such as mystery writer Sara Paretsky, poet Sterling Plumpp, and novelist Michael Anania.
Holden asked some of the latter to take what he calls “the Algren challenge” and respond to a passage from Chicago: City on the Make, in which the author writes, “You can’t belong to Chicago any more than you can belong to the flying saucer called Los Angeles. For it isn’t so much a city as it is a drafty hustler’s junction in which to hustle a while and come on out of the draft.”
Holden will give free slide presentations Saturday at 2 PM at Barnes & Noble, 1130 N. State (312-280-8155), and at 7:30 PM on Thursday, July 19, at Borders Books & Music, 1144 Lake in Oak Park (708-386-6927).
