The concept of regional literature is not new, and a number of students and scholars have studied the impact of time and place on individual authors or groups of writers whose works are influenced by locale. Southern literature and western Americana are prime examples, and the works of many individual writers are characterized and the writers are stereotyped according to the locus of their life and its impact on their writing. Such writers as Larry McMurtry, Jane Smiley, Eudora Welty, and James T. Farrell come immediately to mind. These categories are arbitrary, of course, just as categorizing Ring Lardner as a sports writer or Richard Wright as a black writer is arbitrary, but such stereotypes give the student or scholar a focus that make the writers and their works easier to understand and analyze. This project attempts to identify a body of fiction about Illinois or set in Illinois and treat it as regional literature.

This project was started during the fall of 1971. It was first published by the Scarecrow Press in 1979 under the title, Illinois! Illinois! An Annotated Bibliography of Fiction. The original work contained 1554 entries. The online version contains an additional 679 entries representing new books that have been written since 1976 when gathering titles, reading books, and writing notes was stopped, plus a few titles that were missed or could not be obtained for review prior to 1976.

The Office of Research and Projects at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale provided funding for research assistance, travel, and supplies for the original project. This online edition was partially funded by a grant from the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Library Affairs Research and Publications Committee.