Chicago, Illinois in Requiem for a Nun (Location)

Chicago (along with "Kansas City and Boston and Philadelphia") is cited as an epitome of municipal political corruption (192). The "ghettoes" of Chicago are one of the places (along with those of "New York and Detroit and Los Angeles") to which the Negro tenant farmers and "furnish-hands" who worked in Yoknapatawpha's fields have moved by the 1930s (193). "Northwestern," the private university located in Evanston, Illinois, about a dozen miles north of Chicago, is mentioned as one of the places at which the novel's hypothetical non-Southern reader may have been educated: "yourself the stranger, the outlander from B.A. (or perhaps even M.A.) at Harvard or Northwestern or Stanford" (205).