“The Third Coast:

When Chicago Built

the American Dream” by Thomas Dyja (Penguin Press, 508 pgs., $29.95)

“The Third Coast” is an odd title for Thomas Dyja’s engrossing, wide-angled cultural history of Chicago in the middle of the 20th century.

Although the book is subtitled “When Chicago Built the American Dream,” calling Chicago “The Third Coast” is patronizing, implying that only seaboard cities count; worse, it badly misses the point about a metropolis whose inland location is central to its identity.

So Dyja and his publishers seem to have settled on the title merely to suggest that from 1932 to 1960 Chicago had a cultural effect on the nation at least as great as any U.S. coastal city. “The American way of life in the postwar world was a product of Chicago,” he argues, “from the steel in its new Miesian skyscrapers to its sacks of golden crispy McDonald’s French fries.”

This thesis is supported by looking in on a virtual pantheon of artists and cultural leaders who then lived in Chicago. This gallery of vivid portraits makes for an intensely engaging book, notable for its intellectual breadth, arms-wide research and high-octane prose that keeps it riding high over the mass of details.

“The Third Coast” has its flaws, though. Many chapters start with an excursion into a particular moment in the life of an important figure. Too often, there are no citations to explain how Dyja knows, for instance, that a prominent politician took a whiff of chrysanthemums. These apparent speculations depreciate the authority of a volume so intricately researched.