Chicago seen through the eyes of its writers is a magical place. The streets through which we hurry, the houses that we glance at only casually, the bodies of water we're scarcely aware of as we run our everyday errands acquire new possibilities—romance, fantasy, even occasionally drama—when we peek through the special lenses that our local novelists, poets, journalists, and playwrights provide for us.

Literary Chicago is a guide—not a comprehensive guide, but a selective guide, a set of starting points—to an assortment of places of significance to writers, book lovers, and tourists alike. This is, after all, the place where Carl Sandburg lived and worked, where Playboy magazine was born, where Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine, where Richard Wright and Nelson Algren and Margaret Walker and Studs Terkel were all employed by the WPA while they were struggling to learn their craft. It's where Ana Castillo and Scott Turow and Sara Paretsky now live and write. It's the home of Oprah and her book club, the Cliff Dwellers, R. R. Donnelley, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. By touring Chicago's literary venues and historic landmarks you glimpse not only the city's rich history but also its present opportunities for wonder for anyone who loves books and the artists who create them.

My primary goal in writing this book is not to drop names or churn out an exhaustive list of every writer who's ever lived or worked here, but rather to illuminate this city's literary past by guiding you to a selection of places you can enjoy here and now. I have created walking and driving tours that take you past the homes where many of the city's legendary writers—Carl Sandburg, Edna Ferber, Ernest Hemingway, and Saul Bellow, among others—once lived. I've also tried to include the places where they and some of the lesser-known literary lights have worked, dreamed, complained, commiserated, and loved. I've also thrown in some of the libraries, bookstores, salons, and coffeehouses you can visit in order to foster your own literary interests.

Chicago doesn't like to think of itself as a snobbish, book-lover's town. Yet, by my purely unscientific count, it has more bookstores than London and a comparable amount to New York.1 Practically every night, you can find a poetry-reading open mic going on. And references to literary figures are everywhere. Driving down the street, you might pass a delivery truck from Big Shoulders Bakery, Hemingway House, or Finley Dunne's Tavern. Finley Peter Dunne who? Nonchalantly mentioning that he was the author of the Mr. Dooley columns, a billiard-playing friend of Mark Twain, admired by President Teddy Roosevelt, and as famous as any journalist in his day just might impress the person sitting on the bar stool next to yours.

The literary face of the city is not always what the world sees first. Outsiders associate Chicago with Al Capone and Mayor Daley. Those notable citizens became famous through their own words and deeds, no doubt, but they became legendary through W. R. Burnett's Little Caesar and Mike Royko's Boss.

Sometimes it seems that when you are tracking down literary sites in Chicago you are chasing ghosts. The characters who used to make the Fine Arts Building a lively place are all gone now, for instance. Nelson Algren's home (where he wrote The Man with the Golden Arm and romanced Simone de Beauvoir) is now in the center of the Kennedy Expressway. But getting there is half the fun and on the way you discover things you never would otherwise. You see the real city, in other words.

In "The Real City Tour," a column included in Bill Granger's Chicago Pieces, a collection of his columns from the Chicago Tribune, he writes about taking a colleague on a tour of the "real" Chicago: "I like to show neighborhoods and the strong, ethnic beauty of the city that lives nestled on the other side of viaducts and expressway crossings, the part of the city where the tallest buildings are either the horrible monoliths of the public housing projects or the starkly beautiful churches."

He goes down Maxwell St.; to Pilsen; to Red's, a bar which he places around 22nd and Western ("Everyone stops at Red's for a beer sometime in his life"); to the Criminal Courts Building and the County Jail at 26th and California; to the Italian area at 24th and Oakley; to Bridgeport, where Mayor Daley (Richard J.) lived on Lowe St.; past Comiskey Park; to Kenwood; to Berkeley Ave. where Daley grew up; to 47th St. in Hyde Park; to Chinatown; to Kelly's Pub on Western Ave.; to Lincoln Park; to Greek Islands on Halsted St.; finally ending up at O'Sullivan's on Milwaukee Avenue. These are all places that mean something to him and that play important roles in his writing.

What is the "real" city? The answer is as varied as the people who visit and reside in Chicago. For me, it's the part of the city that writers have known and written about, where they lived, where they went shopping, where they tossed back a few after work, and where they did everyday things. . .