James Farrell and Richard Wright, two inheritors of Dreiser and Sinclair's oeuvre, produced novels of uneven development centered on the ethnic proletariat who were enslaved by the increasing standardization of national life that mass culture and urbanism demanded. Their novels heavily invested in the critical aesthetics of the “new” local color, or what I have been calling the critical regionalism that was essential to Midwestern naturalism's cultural logic. The 1930s nevertheless saw the Midwestern Bildungsroman transition from the “Dreiser school” to the “Wright school” of Illinois literary naturalism, a key aesthetic development that resulted from Chicago's Bronzeville Renaissance (Tracy 1–3). Wright's and Farrell's novels typified an emergent tradition of Midwestern realism in which the representation of social space reacted against the earlier reliance on rural migration tropes in novels by Dreiser, Sinclair, Norris, and others. For naturalist authors of the New Deal era, sociology—interpreted through the materialist rubric of Marxist theory—formed an empirical basis for a literary tradition that would not only reflect the conditions of the masses but transform their world for the better. As we shall find, the Studs Lonigan trilogy and Native Son drew upon sociological research into the effects of industrial built environments on human development, including Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess's influential 1925 edited collection, The City, featuring essays by members of the University of Chicago's School of Sociology, who observed Chicago's multiethnic neighborhoods as primary fieldwork sites. Direct connections link Wright and Farrell with that school: Farrell studied as an undergraduate with Burgess and Park at the University of Chicago, while Wright became acquainted with Park and Louis Wirth through the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago. One empirical model that The City offered their Bildungsromane was a discursive framework for articulating the city's maladjusted youth: they found that Chicago's tendency to fragment community support fostered what Park termed the “juvenile delinquent” type in his essay featured in that collection. Similar concepts were reconceived by Chicago School-trained, African American sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, friends of Wright who interpreted developmental patterns within Chicago's Black Belt with greater nuance in their volume Black Metropolis (1945). The literary innovations produced within the Chicago Renaissance's second wave were informed by the region's “sociological imaginary,” as Carla Cappetti observes (1).