Adam Langer Collection, 1984-2011

  View full finding aid (PDF)
  • Collection ID Archives Adam Langer Collection
  • Creator Names Langer, Adam.
  • Title Adam Langer Collection, 1984-201
  • Physical description 21 linear feet
  • Collection arrangement Adam Langer Collection has been organized into 12 boxes: Published books, Unpublished books, Produced plays and screenplays, articles, clippings, short stories, Unproduced plays and screenplays, Magazines, radio scripts, and Theater reviews.
  • Access and usage restrictions Available for research in the Special Collections and Preservation Division Reading Room of the Chicago Public Library.
  • Collection summary Adam Langer is a novelist, journalist and playwright. His books include novels Crossing California, The Washington Story, Ellington Boulevard and The Thieves of Manhattan, as well as the memoir My Father's Bonus March. The collection documents Langer's career. It contains drafts of his published and unpublished books, scripts, research notes, promotional materials, articles he wrote for the Chicago Reader and nearly a full run of Chicago-based Subnation.
  • Biographical or Historical Note Adam Langer, a novelist, journalist, and playwright was born on July 23, 1967 and grew up in the West Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. Langer attended Vassar College, where he received his bachelor of arts in political science in 1988, while also serving as books editor and later arts editor of the Miscellany News and news director of WVKR-FM. At Vassar, Langer wrote and directed some of his first plays, Almost Twenty, Coming Attractions, What I Need is a Good Bonk on the Head and The View from the River Styx. During the summers in Chicago, he worked as an intern at WBBM News Radio 78 and WXRT-FM, and also as a stand-up comedian, performing mostly in comedy clubs in Chicago suburbs. His brief stand-up career was the subject of an essay that won the College Journalism Award from Rolling Stone magazine and also of his first published article in the Chicago Reader. He continued to write for the Chicago Reader, where he wrote features stories and served as a theater critic until 2000. A 2000-2001 fellowship from the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University took Langer to New York, where he studied the influence of corporate funding on the arts. After living in Morningside Heights during his fellowship year, Langer settled into Manhattan Valley neighborhood and began work on what would become his first published novel, Crossing California.
  • Finding Aids Note Finding aid available in the Reading Room of the Special Collections and Preservation Division and on the Chicago Public Library's web site.
  • Acquisition information The Chicago Public Library acquired the collection in 2011.
  • Names Langer, Adam Archives.
  • Subjects Authors, American Illinois Chicago History Sources.
  • Finding aid URL http://www.chipublib.org/fa-adam-langer-collection/ Finding aid