Novels
- Nelson Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm ISBN 1-58322-008-9
- Blue Balliett's Chasing Vermeer and The Wright 3
- Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March ISBN 0-14-018941-6
- Saul Bellow's Dangling Man
- Saul Bellow's Ravelstein
- Richard Bissell's 7½ Cents uses Chicago as a foil for a fictitious Iowa city.
- Charles Blackstone's The Week You Weren't Here
- Fredric Brown's The Fabulous Clipjoint
- Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files Series
- Robert Wright Campbell's Jimmy Flannery mystery series
- Paul Carson's Final Duty ISBN 0-09-941519-4
- Sean Chercover's Big City, Bad Blood P.I. mystery.
- Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street ISBN 0-679-43335-X
- Doug M. Cummings's Deader by the Lake: A Reno McCarthy Thriller ISBN 0-595-29359-X
- Doug M. Cummings's Every Secret Crime: A Reno McCarthy Novel 2008. Five Star.
- Don DeGrazia's American Skin
- Julie Dever's Say Goodnight, Gracie
- Tom Dowd's Burning Bright ISBN 0-451-45368-9
- Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie ISBN 0-451-52760-7
- Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago ISBN 0-312-42425-6
- James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy
- Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End ISBN 978-0-316-01638-4
- Edna Ferber's So Big
- John M. Ford's The Last Hot Time ISBN 0-312-87578-9
- Melvin E. Giles's George Street, Our Street ISBN 0-9656364-0-2
- John Grisham's The Litigators
- Michael T. Harvey's The Chicago Way and The Fifth Floor
- Aleksandar Hemon's Nowhere Man ISBN 0-375-72702-7
- Ward Just's An Unfinished Season
- Harry Stephen Keeler's The Riddle of the Traveling Skull ISBN 1-932416-26-9 (and many other novels by Keeler)
- Adam Langer's Crossing California and The Washington Story (the latter a semi-sequel to the former)
- Nella Larsen's Quicksand ISBN 0-14-118127-3
- Nella Larsen's Passing ISBN 0-14-243727-1
- Jeanette Lee's Mr. Achilles
- Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge ISBN 1-4000-3420-5
- Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned
- Thomas Mullen The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers
- Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife ISBN 0-15-602943-X
- Frank Norris's The Pit
- Achy Obejas's Memory Mambo
- Sara Paretsky's thrillers featuring private eye V.I. Warshawski
- Richard Peck's Fair Weather
- Daniel Pinkwater's The Education of Robert Nifkin
- Veronica Roth's "Divergent"
- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus!
- Upton Sinclair's The Jungle ISBN 1-884365-30-2
- Greg Leitich Smith's Ninjas, Piranhas and Galileo
- Terrance L. Smith's The Thief Who Came to Dinner
- Scott Spencer's Endless Love
- Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the smartest kid on earth (mostly set in Chicago)
- Richard Wright's Native Son ISBN 0-06-092980-4
Erik Larson's "The Devil in the White City"
Read more about this topic: List Of Fiction Set In Chicago
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens—of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)