Theodore Dreiser

There is an obvious relevance to Chicago's future in the three-ring circus (make that five-ring) that just concluded in China. Beijing's Olympic venues, opening ceremony and the like will provide points of comparison not just for London in 2012 but also...

Is Philip K. Dick the father of the paranoid style in American fiction? "Every pay phone in the world was tapped," a character thinks in "A Scanner Darkly." "Or if it wasn't some crew somewhere just hadn't gotten around to it." As it happens, that...

America America A Novel Ethan Canin Random House: 466 pp., $27 It's refreshing -- and almost quaint -- to see someone try to write a Great American Novel in the 21st century. These days, writers are more apt to pursue the Great American Screenplay...

The holy grail of the author's own collector's quest is the 1961 1s 3d Parliamentary Conference stamp, which he recalls as being "the most beautiful small object I had ever seen" as a boy. On this stamp, the head of the queen, which should by rights...

The UCLA Film & Television Archive is no small place. The Library of Congress aside, it's the biggest collection in the country, with film holdings alone numbering a staggering 85,000 titles. Wouldn't you like to take a peek at the rarities hidden in...

Crowds packed the sidewalks and streets on this date to watch Chicago's high society pour into Marshall Field's first store on State Street, a grand marble edifice with Corinthian columns. As was frequently the case, Marshall Field was on hand to...

Frank Doubleday publishes Theodore Dreiser's novel that helps establish an enduring Chicago tradition: fiction in the raw, tawdry but compassionate. Published on this date, Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" was among the most auspicious debuts in...

WALT DISNEY: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler. Knopf, 851 pp. $35. He was the closest thing the world has ever had to an undisputed King of Cartoons. Yet even he admitted that there were people working for him who could draw better...

Imagine Marlon Brando in his Mark Antony toga from Julius Caesar, astride the worlds of classical and modern acting like the Colossus of Rhodes. And then re-imagine him magnificent in ruins, still inspiring generations of actors with his emotional and...

233-237 Bleecker St.: One of the oldest surviving wooden structures in the Village, believed to have inspired Edward Hopper's iconic painting "Early Sunday Morning." St. Anthony of Padua Church: Built in 1886, the first church built for an Italian...

(U). Macabre but delicately rendered romantic triangle involving a dwarf taxidermist, a hunky chef and the girl he really loves. Perverse and chilling, but also novel, smart. With Ernesto Mahieux, Valerio Foglia Manzillo, Elisabetta Rocchetti....

Beginnings: Though this section of the original Aquebogue purchase was divvied into 60 lots as early as 1660, there was not much activity there until the late 18th Century. That is, except for the building of a cart path through the ``Great Woods'' in...