Join us for "Richard Wright's 'Shame of Chicago,'" a talk by Liesl Olson

Olson will discuss Wright's scathing 1951 critique of Chicago, published in Ebony magazine, and the documentary impulse of Wright's work. She will also consider some of the surprising influences that went into the making of Wright's luminous introduction to Cayton and Drake's Black Metropolis (1945), including Wright's understanding of ideas first introduced to him by Gertrude Stein. Olson will explore the unexpected ways in which Stein's ideas about modernist literary development are embedded in the now classic study of black Chicago.