The Frunchroom’s origin story began in a bar (where else) when a few people sat around imagining what a South Side storytelling series set in Beverly/Morgan Park might be like. One of those people was Bill Savage, who finally found a way to make our schedule match up with his and will be reading at our next event.
Bill teaches Chicago literature, history, and culture at Northwestern University and the Newberry Library, and works as an editor at the University of Chicago Press. He has edited, co-edited, introduced, and/or annotated, books by several classic Chicago writers, including Nelson Algren, Ben Hecht, and Bill Granger, as well as contemporary authors like Liam Ford, Neil Steinberg, Dmitry Samarov (a past Frunchroom reader), and Dominic Pacyga. Savage regularly reviews books for the Chicago Tribune, and his essays and op-eds have appeared in Time Out Chicago, the Chicago Reader, New City, Crain’s Chicago Business, and many other publications with “Chicago” in their masthead, and he is a contributing writer to The Paper Machete’s live lit series.
His most recent work was the annotated Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker’s Guide to the Paris of America (with Paul Durica), a guide to the seamier side of the 1893 Columbian Exposition; his next book is an annotated edition of George Ade’s 1931 anti-Prohibition volume, The Old-Time Saloon, due out from the U of C Press this fall.
Savage has always lived in the same zip code, 60626, in the Rogers Park neighborhood of the Far North Side. But since summer of 2006, he has spent 2/7ths of his life in greater Beverly.
You can follow him on Twitter @rogersparkman, and he will begin blogging as soon as blogging is totally passé, at rogersparkman.com. He would like to apologize to any respectable person named Roger Sparkman for having taken these handles.
Bill will be reading a piece about how someone can be part of two distant and different Chicago neighborhoods. Join us on Thursday, April 21st at 730pm in O’Rourke’s Office.
