About the Author

Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History Emeritus at Lafayette College and author of ten books, including Vicksburg, and Masters of the Air, currently being made into a television series by Tom Hanks. He has hosted, coproduced, or served as historical consultant for more than thirty television documentaries and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications.

Reviews

John Barron Chicago Sun-Times With City of the Century, Miller has written what will be judged as the great Chicago history.

David McCullough author of John Adams Brims with life, with people, surprise, and with stories -- and stories within stories -- all worth telling.

Morris Dickstein The Washington Post Sweeping and beautifully written.

Michiko Kakutani The New York Times A wonderfully readable account of Chicago's early history.

A desolate fur-trading outpost in 1830, Chicago became, within half a century, the nation's railroad hub, livestock and packing center and a manufacturing giant. A glorious anthem to a tumultuous city, this synthesis of industrial, social and cultural history captures the raw, robust spirit of Chicago on every page. Miller, a history professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, peoples his big, colorful, engrossing canvas with architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, railroad entrepreneur George Pullman, settlement-house workers Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, "Meat king" Philip Armour, dry-goods merchant Marshall Field, retailers Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, reaper inventor Cyrus McCormick, mail-order pioneer Aaron Montgomery Ward, Theodore Dreiser, Lincoln Steffens and others. Chicago-with its experience of mass transit, a regimented workforce, instant suburbs, the Americanization of diverse immigrant groups and battles between privatism and the public good-serves as a prism through which we watch the emergence of modern American life. (Apr.)

John Barron Chicago Sun-Times With City of the Century, Miller has written what will be judged as the great Chicago history.
David McCullough author of John Adams Brims with life, with people, surprise, and with stories -- and stories within stories -- all worth telling.
Morris Dickstein The Washington Post Sweeping and beautifully written.
Michiko Kakutani The New York Times A wonderfully readable account of Chicago's early history.