HOGTOWN

​In 2016, writer-director Daniel Nearing's film Hogtown announced the arrival of a genuinely original American voice. The Chicago Sun-Times called it "the most original film made in Chicago about Chicago to date." Ben Kenigsberg of The New York Times named it to his list of the ten best films of the year, writing that "Daniel Nearing has carved out an original and boldly unfashionable niche. Hogtown feels like a find from a forgotten archive." The Chicago Reader named it the best film set in Chicago, and the best film made in Chicago, "period."

 

Now Nearing — a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and MacDowell, the inaugural Filmmaker in Residence for the City of Chicago, and the Chicago Tribune's Chicagoan of the Year for Film — has returned to the world he built originally as a draft novel starting in 1995, adapted later to the screen, and is now bringing back to its origins.

 

Hogtown the book is what the film always wanted to become: a full inhabitation of 1919 Chicago, of the unsolved disappearance of millionaire theatre owner Ambrose Greenaway, of a Black detective who cannot quite believe in his own existence, and of a twenty-year-old Ernest Hemingway learning, on these very streets, what to look at and what to look away from.

 

It is a novel about the city that made American literature — and about everyone the literature forgot.