This admirable book, subtitled The Missing Chapter, is
a treat to read but has all the appropriate scholarly underpinnings.
Plentiful footnotes are located at the back of the book rather than at
the bottom of the page and are worth turning back for.
Illustrations include a photograph of the original Queen City Club at Seventh and Elm streets where, later, an art deco building for the telephone company would rise. Sinclair Lewis holed up in this formidable mansion in the early 1920s to write Babbitt. Novelist Fanny Hurst went from Cincinnati to New York City, where her successful career eventually rewarded her with a triplex apartment and social interaction with the Lindberghs, the Roosevelts (Franklin and Eleanor) and others. Although seldom read today, her novel Back Street begins in the Queen City. Brown quotes a scholar as saying Hurst’s work “is ripe for rediscovery by feminist cultural historians.”
Perhaps the most fun is the final chapter, on the Elliston Poet-in-Residence program at the University of Cincinnati, a wonderfully un-Cincinnati-like mixture of prominent poets and parties. Brown gained access to “a meticulously kept, unpublished journal” for her description of the goings on. The program continues today, she writes, “but in a different way.” Grade: A
