The history of modernism in Chicago, as told by the writers who were there. 

 London, Paris, and New York all have their chroniclers, and now Chicago gets her due. A city of enormous contemporary literary vitality, it also was the home of a profoundly generative burst of creativity that helped shape modernism as we know it. Robert Alexander locates this efflorescence in its historical context, and then lets the participants speak for themselves. Part oral history, part anthology, and assembled from names well known and not (including Ford Madox Ford, Sherwood Anderson, W.E.B. DuBois, Edgar Lee Masters, and Eunice Tietjens), in A Robin's Egg Renaissance, Alexander has assembled a chorus of voices that shaped modernist aesthetics on the shores of Lake Michigan, with after effects in places and years far beyond.