Writer Barry Gifford, who inspired David Lynch’s ‘Wild at Heart’ and ‘Lost Highway,’ gets a movie from his Chicago years
CHICAGO — On those frequently published lists of great Chicago writers we see, you know, the usual suspects … Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, Ben Hecht, Saul Bellow, Loraine Hansberry, Mike Royko, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Theodore Dreiser and, more recently, Scott Turow, Stuart Dybek, Sandra Cisneros and on and on and creatively on.
Many of these people were not born here. Algren was born in Detroit, Terkel in New York City, Bellow in Montreal and Brooks in Kansas. But what matter? They were all formed here.
One name that rarely appears on such lists is that of Barry Gifford, a writer who
