In 1893, Chicago, Illinois, USA — a city whose identity was already linked to its fierce Lake Michigan winds — hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, the largest world's fair in history to that date, attracting 27 million visitors to its White City of neoclassical exhibition buildings along the lakefront. The Exposition showcased the latest technological achievements including electric lighting, the telephone, and early wind measurement instruments, establishing Chicago as the technological capital of America. The fair's cultural impact on American arts, letters, and urban planning was immense and long-lasting.

The 1893 Exposition generated an extraordinary literary response: Henry Blake Fuller's novels satirised its social pretensions, and it set the stage for Chicago's emergence as a major literary city in the early twentieth century. Carl Sandburg's poem Chicago (1914), which celebrated the city as 'City of the Big Shoulders' and acknowledged its famous winds, drew directly on the cultural mythology the Exposition created. The 'Windy City' epithet — originally a political insult — entered literary language as a symbol of American urban energy, boast, and bravado.