Full Title: Chicago by Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor; Drawings by Lester G. Hornsby
Location: Internet Archive Date Published: 1917
ONE night, after a supper given by Richard Mansfield to Coquelin the Inimitable, I stood beside Sarah Bernhardt on the balcony of a Chicago hotel. The moon had laid a silver trail across the lake, the buildings of the city loomed shadowy in the night. Below us blazed the lights of Michigan Avenue ; from its pavement came the rumble of many cabs speeding to places of revelry. A moment of silence had come to appease the fatigue of speaking in a foreign tongue ; but it was broken by the surpassing woman beside me. ” I adore Chicago,” she exclaimed. “It is the pulse of America.”
Today’s Library selection was chosen not for its prose, but its pictures. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor wrote a beautifully penned love letter to the city, but the sketches are what caught my eye. I have not found any biography of the illustrator, Lester Hornsby. Strangely, and I’m not sure why, the drawings seem to bring to mind the art work described by Theodore Dreiser for his major character (Eugene Witla) in The Genius.
Hornsby is listed as the illustrator for other urban themed works such as Rambles Around Old BostonbyEdwin M. Bacon (1914). He is also listed as an illustrator in the October, 1918 issue of The Century Magazine( 7 drawings by Lester G. Hornby titled “Paris Vistas”) Unfortunately, that is all I know of Mr. Hornsby – except that I enjoy his work. Here are several more examples:
Time was when I knew a goodly pro-
portion of the passers-by in the downtown
streets — men, like myself, of New Eng-
land blood, whose fathers felled our forests
and tilled our prairie land. Now, as I
stroll through the heart of
the city at the
hour when the great office buildings and
department stores are emptying them-
selves, I search the scurrying crowds in
vain for a familiar face; and as I am borne
on by the human torrent gushing from the
crag-like walls about me, I feel that, like
my Puritanical traditions, I belong to an-
other age.
