Author Stuart Dybek's two collections of short stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods and The Coast of Chicago, have prompted critics to rank him with such American literary giants as Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson as a master of the short story. His stories unfold in the working-class Slavic and Mexican neighborhoods of Chicago, areas bounded by the freeways, cement rivers, and rail lines of the "city of big shoulders." The people who inhabit Dybek's fiction, observed John B. Breslin in a review of The Coast of Chicago for the Washington Post Book World, are "young men, mostly, whose imaginations are their only defense against urban reality." Dybek collects the hopes and fears of his characters, their joy and loneliness, and distills them into lushly detailed stories of urban life that often drift into dreams. The stories "move easily between the gritty reality of urban decay," noted Breslin, "and a magical realm of lyricism and transcendence linked to music, art and religion."

Dybek was born in 1942, in one of Chicago's many immigrant neighborhoods. Like the characters in his short story "Blight," published in Coast of Chicago, he pursued his interest in music by playing the saxophone and working in a local record store. "I saved my money and took lessons on the saxophone until I was good enough to play in bands and combos," he told Detroit News Magazine interviewer Henrietta Epstein. "Jazz and the saxophone created that break I was able to make from the narrow life of the old neighborhood." In "Blight," Dybek fictionalizes the escape from despair via the creative imagination. A band of teenagers transmute their neighborhood's designation as an "official blight area" from a curse to a blessing, forming a rock-and-roll band called the Blighters and, at one point, renaming their surroundings an "Official Blithe Area."

Dybek attended what he called a "blood-and-guts" Catholic high school where, according to Epstein, "reading was considered unmanly and writing would have been out of the question." Dybek told Epstein that he soon "rebelled against the religion, the nuns, the narrowness of their teaching, their goddamned hangups about sex." After graduation from high school, Dybek enrolled as a pre-med student at nearby Loyola University of Chicago but soon dropped out and immersed himself in the growing peace and civil rights movement. He eventually received a bachelor's and a master's degree from Loyola, but he didn't begin to focus on his career as a writer until he entered the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Iowa, considered one of the nation's best writing programs. Dybek has taught English at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, since 1974.

Dybek's first published work was a collection of poetry, Brass Knuckles, that, said Epstein, "centers on urban life in a poor immigrant community in Chicago among struggling, fearful parents and infirm grandparents." "Instead of the hard-edged realism you might expect from such subject matter," she added, "the language in these poems is beautiful and haunting and mysterious." His first collection of short stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, moved reviewers to note Dybek's penchant for infusing gritty city life with an air of mystery and romance. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Dick Roraback praised Dybek's "gift" as a "sorcerer's ability to commix the commonplace and the grotesque, a volatile stew spiced by an imagery that's hard to equal among contemporary writers." Ivan Gold, reviewing the collection for the New York Times Book Review, argued that Dybek "bends his flair for naturalism on an anvil of fantasy, with bizarre results that yet seem utterly consistent with the logic of childhood."

In structure and subject, Dybek's Coast of Chicago resembles Hemingway's short story collection In Our Time and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio: like the former, it intersperses complete, self-contained stories with shorter, condensed pieces that could be poems; like the latter, it explores a city through the eyes of young people. But Joseph Coates, in his review of the book in Chicago Tribune Books, notes that Dybek's characters, unlike those in the other books, are not leaving town, nor do they look on it with bitterness: "Dybek's lyric nostalgia looks back with almost unqualified fondness on urban neighborhoods that were like small towns in their sense of community." Where Hemingway and Anderson dealt in themes of modernist angst and alienation, Dybek acknowledges the simple pleasures of being young. His characters are fully immersed in the joys of late adolescence and, if they are aware of its pains, those pains are muted by the bonds they share with friends and family.