Crimmins, Jerry 1944-

PERSONAL:

Born 1944.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Chicago, IL.

CAREER:

Newspaper reporter and editor, Chicago, IL. Worked as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, City News Bureau of Chicago, and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Awards for investigative reporting, deadline reporting, nondeadline reporting, and feature writing.

WRITINGS:

Fort Dearborn: A Novel, foreword by Gerald Danzer, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Chicago journalist Jerry Crimmins is known for his investigative reporting, including a story he wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times that led to the largest grand jury investigation of voter fraud in the history of Chicago, and which resulted in more than fifty convictions.

A student of Chicago history, Crimmins spent six years researching the history of Fort Dearborn, the first settlement in the area that would become Chicago. Fort Dearborn: A Novel is a story based on fact. In the novel, Crimmins tells of the August 15, 1812, massacre initiated by the British that ended with the deaths of more than sixty American soldiers and civilians and approximately fifteen Natives. Tom McNamee noted in a Chicago Sun-Times review: "Scalps were taken, the heads of children were bashed in, and a man's heart was eaten—a form of ritualistic cannibalism that Crimmins, to his credit, doesn't leave out." A Curled Up with a Good Book reviewer wrote: "Fort Dearborn is a fascinating look at how people lived during the early 1800s in America, the relations between the natives and the Americans and other nations involved, and how circumstances and events led up to one of the most famous massacres in American history. One of the best things about the book is that the different peoples are not painted with too broad a brush." A Publishers Weekly contributor described the history as being "vividly imagined and scrupulously documented."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, July 1, 2006, Connie Fletcher, review of Fort Dearborn: A Novel, p. 29.

Chicago Sun-Times, December 17, 2006, Tom McNamee, review of Fort Dearborn.

Publishers Weekly, May 22, 2006, review of Fort Dearborn, p. 29.

ONLINE

Curled Up with a Good Book,http://www.curledup.com/ (July 14, 2007), review of Fort Dearborn.

Pritzker Military Library Web site,http://www.pritzkermilitarylibrary.org/ (July 14, 2007), brief biography.