During the Jazz Age, The Chicagoan magazine was published as a rip-off of the New Yorker, but for the Second City set. Although its writing was less-than-stellar, the magazine covers and interior illustrations were more than. Neil Harris, Preston & Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History and of Art History began researching the magazine in the late 1980s when he stumbled across it in the Regenstein library, and now a near-complete run is digitally available through the University of Chicago Library in The Chicagoan digital archive. The magazine’s run can be browsed on the web by date or by volume, and is also full-text searchable. In 2008, Harris published a book about the magazine, which folded in 1935, called The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.
For more information, check out The Chicagoan digital archive and Harris’ book The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.
Via Chicago Reader
Image: The Chicagoan, June 14, 1926 (vol. 1, no. 1), cover. Copyright The Quigley Publishing Company, a Division of QP Media, Inc.