"Out of the Twisted Twenties flowered the promise of Chicago as the homeland and heartland of an American renaissance, a place of poets and sculptors to come, of singers and painters, dancers, actors and actresses of golden decades yet to be. [...] / Thirty years later we stand on the rim of a cultural Sahara with not a camel in sight. The springs dried up and the sands drifted in, and the caravans went the other way."