The Rise & Fall of the Dil Pickle

Jazz-Age Chicago's Wildest & Most Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot

edited by Franklin Rosemont, introduction by Paul Durica

with contributions by Sam Dolgoff

Publication date: January 2003, updated 2013 and 2023
Paperback: $15.00

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What do Lucy Parsons, Clarence Darrow, Carl Sandburg, Mary MacLane, Lawrence Lipton, Elizabeth Davis (Queen of the Hoboes), Jun Fujita, Sherwood Anderson, Ralph Chaplin, Katherine Dunham, Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Rexroth, Sam Dolgoff, and Slim Brundage have in common? They were all Dil Picklers!

Founded in 1914 by former Wobbly Jack Jones, Irish revolutionist Jim Larkin, and a group of fantastic IWW-oriented Bughouse Square hobos and soapboxers, the Dil Pickle Club, in just a few years, was widely recognized as the wildest, most playful, most creative, and most radical nightspot in the known universe—especially after Dr. Ben Reitman joined the club in 1917.

In this book, Franklin Rosemont has collected forty-one reminiscences of the Dil Pickle by poets, artists, journalists, novelists, hobos, scholars, anarchist, wobblies, and other assorted radicals and oddballs. This brand new edition (for 2013) includes an introduction by Paul Durica.