Meet the Readers: Edward McClelland

Edward McClelland is a contributing editor at Chicago magazine. Ted’s most recent book, Chorus Of The Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside Their Rivalry to Save the Nation, was released in 2024 by Pegasus Books. His previous book, Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Built the Middle Class, is a narrative account of the 1936-37 Flint Sit Down Strike, which led to the establishment of the United Auto Workers as the nation’s flagship labor union. His 2016 book How to Speak Midwestern is a guide to the speech and sayings of Middle America, which The New York Times called “a dictionary wrapped in some serious dialectology inside a gift book trailing a serious whiff of Relevance.” 

After getting his start in journalism at the Lansing Community College Lookout, Ted went on to work for the Chicago Reader, where he met Barack Obama during his failed 2000 campaign for Congress. His coverage of that race became the basis of Young Mr, Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President. His book The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes, a travelogue of a 10,000-mile journey around the Lakes, won the 2008 Great Lakes Book Award in General Nonfiction. 

Please join Ted and our other great readers on Tuesday, March 3, 2026 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7:30. It's free, and 21-and-over. Please RSVP on Facebook.