Best-Selling History of an American City

Here is the best-selling history of an American city like no other -- and of the vibrant people who built it. The Yankees who came west to gamble fortunes on the Board of Trade, the Swifts and Amours, Fields and McCormicks, and the new immigrants who worked in their stockyards, stores and railroads -- together and at odds they built Chicago out of the prairie mud, and built it again when the Great Fire destroyed it.

This is a story of political turmoil, of corruption, of social striving and reform: the Haymarket Massacre, the Pullman Strike, Jane Adams of Hull House, and the notorious Al Capone. The entrepreneurial giants, the gangsters and mayors of legend, the poets, like Sandburg and MacLeish, and architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright -- all belong to Chicago, and populate this incredible book.

From the Everleigh Club brothel to the patriotic song of George F. Root, Fabulous Chicago is a history that is alive with the unbelievable spirit of one of the world's great cities.