An Everyman Museum to Celebrate American Writers

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER MAY 8,

2017

CHICAGO — Enter the new American Writers Museum, which opens here on

May 16, and you find yourself standing under a canopy of dead trees, in the form of a
rippling, color-coordinated cloud of books bolted to the ceiling.
But take a sharp right into a small gallery, and you’re standing in the middle of
a small grove of exotic live ones.
“One of the things we got asked a lot when we started was whether the museum
was going to be an athenaeum, with leather chairs and lots of oak,” Andrew Anway, its
lead designer, said, standing near a thicket of potted palms, part of an immersive
temporary installation inspired by the nature poetry (and Hawaiian garden) of W. S.
Merwin.
“That was something we really wanted to dispel,” Mr. Anway continued. “We
want people who come here to have different kinds of experiences around Thoreau had
his cabin; Emily Dickinson had her bedroom; and now America will have what organizers are
saying is the first museum dedicated to the collective accomplishments of the nation’s
writers.literature.”
But rather than a temple to solitary creation, the nearly 11,000 square feet of
galleries — housed on the second floor of an office building on North Michigan
Avenue, not far from top tourist draws like the Art Institute and Millennium Park —
might be seen as a convivial shared apartment.
Instead of manuscripts and first editions, there are interactive touch screens
and high-tech multimedia installations galore, like a mesmerizing “Word Waterfall,”
in which a wall of densely packed, seemingly random words is revealed, through a
constantly looping light projection, to contain resonant literary quotations.
There are also homier touches, like cozy couches in the children’s literature
gallery and even the occasional smell of cookies, unleashed whenever someone pushes
the plaque for Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” included in an
installation called “The Surprise Bookshelf.”
The museum, created with nearly $10 million in privately raised money, may
not own any artifacts. But it does have one on loan for the next six months: the
famous 120-foot scroll on which Jack Kerouac banged out “On the Road.”
It’s a treasure that seems perfectly matched to the museum’s populist, D.I.Y.
spirit — and not just because it’s displayed near a table of vintage typewriters, loaded
with paper and ready for visitors to use.
“It really illustrates the idea of process, the way that Kerouac taped together
tracing paper, cut it and then went nuts,” Carey Cranston, the museum’s president,
said. “To be able to physically look down and see the amount of work that went into it
is a great way to show what writers actually do.”
The museum is the brainchild of Malcolm O’Hagan, a retired executive from
the Washington, D.C., area. He visited the Dublin Writers Museum on a visit to his
native Ireland eight years ago and found himself wondering why there was nothing
similar in the United States.
Within months, Mr. O’Hagan incorporated a nonprofit dedicated to the project.
He soon hired Mr. Anway, founder of the Boston-based firm Amaze Design, who
organized brainstorming sessions with writers, publishers, scholars, teachers and
booksellers in various cities. (Chicago was ultimately chosen as a location because of
its strong tourist traffic and rich literary history, which is explored in a gallery.)
One crucial decision was including only dead writers in the permanent
exhibitions, leaving living ones to the museum’s temporary shows and live events. Mr.
O’Hagan also decided not to hire a permanent curator, instead relying on a core
“content leadership team” of a half-dozen and around 50 subject experts who advised
Mr. Anway’s team.
“With a curator, you get that person’s point of view and biases,” Mr. O’Hagan
said. “We thought a group approach would be better.” (The museum has 15 employees
and an annual operating budget of about $1.9 million.)
And then there was the name, which won out over the more staid Museum of
American Literature.
 “The word ‘literature’ has a highbrow feel, and we wanted a broader audience,”
Mr. O’Hagan said. “We debated it back and forth, but ultimately decided the focus on
writers was the right one. People are always fascinated by creative people.”
The populist approach, and emphasis on literature’s social relevance and
“relatability,” might not sit well in literary and academic circles. But Max Rudin, the
publisher of the Library of America and a member of the content leadership team, said
it fit the American literary tradition itself.
“American literary culture is uniquely democratic and sort of bubbles up from
below,” he said. “One of the mysteries of literary creation is that it’s made by men and
women who are basically like us. If the museum can create that sense of intimacy and
connection, that’s a great thing.”
he exhibits reflect a kind of push-and-pull between playful immersion and
more traditional instruction. Head from the entrance in one direction into a gallery
called “A Nation of Writers” and you get what might be called the logical, left-brain
approach to literature, anchored by an 85-foot-long wall that tells the chronological
story of American writing through 100 significant writers. (The museum is careful not
to say “best.”)
Those wanting more can use touch screens to navigate video commentaries on
the themes of identity, opportunity and experimentation by the NPR critic Maureen
Corrigan and the literary scholars Ilan Stavans and Ivy Wilson. (Mr. Anway estimated
that the total word count of spoken and written texts in the museum was “the
equivalent of three novels” — a lot, he said, for a museum of this size.)
Bored by the parade of greats, or just looking for a quicker hit? That “Surprise
Bookshelf” is just opposite, offering short glosses on a democratic jumble of 100
pieces of “memorable writing,” including Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama,” Susan
Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” and Timex’s “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking”
advertising slogan.
The other main gallery, called “The Mind of a Writer,” offers a more right-brain
view, focused on creativity and process. There are large interactive touch-screen tables
where visitors can dig more deeply into the history, reception and meaning of 25
“masterworks” in various genres, including “The Great Gatsby,” “Their Eyes Were
Watching God,” “Harold and the Purple Crayon” and “Silent Spring.”
 There’s also a wall featuring quotations about writing from Octavia Butler,
Henry Miller and others, and potted writing lessons (“One snappy verb outweighs a
pile of adjectives”), illustrated with interactive features like a “do-it-yourself dialogue
generator.” A touch-screen grid lets you match your habits — do you prefer brownies
or daiquiris as fuel? writing in hotels or in the open air? — to those of the greats.
“The idea is to inspire people to do their own writing,” Mr. Cranston said.
Visitors have to dig to get past the overall mood of inspirational uplift and
moral progress and find knottier currents. Those who skip Ms. Corrigan’s video
commentary on literary experimentalism, for example, may not realize that “Lolita” is
more than a novel that “hinges on a road trip — a classic American genre — and riffs
on motel and teen culture,” as the brief wall text dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov puts
it.
And there’s little indication that literature has been the source of passionate
contention — including over what literature is for, and which writers belong in a
museum like this, anyway.
Mr. Anway said he would be “shocked” if the museum’s emphases and
exclusions didn’t generate arguments. But it is open to revision, he said, just like
American literature itself.
“We aren’t saying this is an encyclopedic place,” he said. “It will change.”

Questions for Comprehension and Analysis

1. What did Andrew Anway, lead designer, say about the goal of the American Writers
Museum? Where is the museum within the City of Chicago?
2. What interactive exhibits are in the museum? What homier touches? Where did the
money come from to create the museum?
3. Who is Malcolm O’Hagan and where did he come up with the idea for the museum?
 4. What is Amaze Design, and what brainstorming did the company do? What crucial
decision did it make?
5. Describe three of the museum’s exhibits. How does the name of the museum reflect
the attitude of the designers and the goals of its founder?
6. Would you want to go visit? Why or why not?