ABSTRACT
WHEN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO was opened in 1892, it included a Department of Sociology that came to dominate sociological perspectives in the United States for the next forty years. The ‘Chicago School’ was especially important to subcultural studies, with sociologists turning their attention to marginal social groups and ‘deviant’ social behaviour. They were empirical rather than theoretical in their approach, often going out into the fi eld to do ethnographic research, much in the tradition of anthropology. Chicago was invariably their source and their resource, the second-largest city in the United States at the time and the destination for a wide variety of immigrant populations, not just from Europe and elsewhere but also from the American hinterland. Two famous, turn-of-the-century American novels give a kind of archetypal expression to early immigrant movement into Chicago: the journalist Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1890), about an ambitious young provincial woman who comes to Chicago in 1889 from a small mid-Western town, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), about a family of Lithuanian immigrants who arrive in Chicago and fi nd themselves put to work in the notorious Union Stock Yards. In these novels, the gulf between rich and poor in Chicago was charted through the carefully rendered lives of outsiders, new arrivals. The literary genre they used was naturalism, a ‘sociological’ genre which was drawn simultaneously to the ordinary and the aberrant and which, at this time, was also built around the ‘muckraking’ exposé of slum life on the one hand and corruption at the top on the other.
