GEORGE ADE (1866-1944)
"My ambition"was to report people as the really were, as I saw them to be in their everyday life, and as I knew them to be." In the 'Stories' there was not much emphasis on plot, but instead carefully sketched, detailed incidents in the delineation of real characters in real life, depicting various episodes in their lives as related through the medium of their own talk." -- George Ade [Stories of Streets and Town, Introduction, p.xxiii]
George Ade, born in the small town of Kentland, Indiana in 1866, was just close enough to Chicago to see the glow of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Raised in a middle class family of modest means, he received a scholarship to attend the fledgling Purdue University, where he befriended John T. McCutcheon. Ade became the one-man staff for a Republican newspaper in Lafayette, Indiana after graduation, while McCutcheon, an artist, joined the staff of the Chicago Morning News. The quest for a decent paycheck led Ade to Chicago in 1890, where McCutcheon helped him get a job with the Morning News. The two friends shared a room and began collaborating on a daily column, "Stories of the Streets and the Town." Breaking from past journalistic styles, Ade recorded sketches based on real life observation from Chicago's streets, with McCutcheon providing the accompanying illustrations. George Ade is best known for his work as a fabulist and playwright, but it was his early years as a Chicago newspaperman that helped develop his literary style.
Ade and McCutcheon wandered the streets of Chicago looking for inspiration from real people and life experiences. They were joined by other young journalists of the day, among them Ray Stannard Baker, Peter Finley Dunne and Eugene Field. A generation that reveled in experiencing street life as well as reform, their comradery extended well beyond the bounds of the newspaper office. These young journalists belonged to various press associations, but also were active in a less traditional association, the Whitechapel Club, located at Wells and Madison near the Daily News. It was described by Ade:
The fact that Jack the Ripper was their patron saint will give a dim idea of the hard-boiledness of the organization. They had kind works and excuses for many of the anarchists who had been hanged for the bomb-throwing at the Haymarket riot. They were social revolutionists and single-taxers and haters of the rich. They scoffed at the conventional and orthodox and deplored the cheap futility of their own slave-tasks as contributors to the daily press. They were young men enjoying their first revolt." [from "When Good Fellows Got Together" Hearst's International Magazine Feb. 1927]
These selections from George Ade originally appeared in The Chicago Record, a publication of The Chicago Daily News. Starting as a $12-a-week weather reporter in 1890, Ade soon began collaborating on a year-long series on the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with illustrator John McCutcheon. Ade and McCutcheon were given a daily space on the editorial page which grew into their column, "Stories of the Streets and of the Town," devoted to descriptive sketches of Chicago life.
