Of the millions of men and women who have made their mark here, few were as prolific and artful as Edgar Miller, even though most of you have never heard of him.

“Anyone who has explored Edgar Miller’s biography has tended to think of him as a conspicuously overlooked figure in Midwestern modern art,” write Hannah Dykstra and Jeff Kruse in their spectacular new book, “A Total Work of Art: The Story of Edgar Miller,” 160-some pages that will go a long way in bringing this rare talent into our present frenetic times.

That will especially be true if paired with a previous book. “Edgar Miller and the Hand-Made Home: Chicago’s Forgotten Renaissance Man” is the 2009 creation of Rich Cahan and Michael Williams (with outstanding photos by Alexander Vertikoff). This pair has been in the enriching business of creating and publishing, through their CityFiles Press, Chicago-focused books about such people as photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel, photographer Vivian Meier, South Side nightclubs, the Uptown Theatre and Barack Obama.

Dykstra and Kruse both benefited from the ongoing work and advocacy of the Edgar Miller Legacy, a nonprofit devoted to Miller’s work. They also credit Cahan and Williams with “diligently piecing together Edgar’s biography and giving us the historical foundation for this project.”

That biography, a life story that the writers say “borders on the unbelievable,” is captured in lively, colorful and evocative drawings (and some photos) and words. It starts in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where Miller was born in 1899 and explored a place where “art and nature went hand in hand. The corner of the world where my family settled abounded with nature’s incredible shapes.”

He spent some teenage years at his father’s bee farm in Australia until a drought forced them back to Idaho, and then he was off to the School of the Art Institute. His first home in the city was at Jane Addams Hull House, and here he would stay for decades, leaving the SAIC after two years and diving into the city’s art scene.

He spread himself energetically across disciplines, including architecture and graphic design, stained glass, sculpture and stone cutting, mural painting and woodcarving; painting, drawing, etching, lithographs …the list goes on and on.

His most well-known and ambitious creations were what were called his “Handmade Homes,” or Victorian homes in the Old Town neighborhood which were transformed into richly detailed studio apartment buildings. A couple of these “artistic environment” projects are still standing, including the Carl Street Studios (aka the Kogen-Miller Studios) on Burton Place and the Glasner Studio on Wells Street.

The words by Dykstra, now living and working in China, and Kruse, who is the legacy’s director of operations, are to the point and often poetic, as in “Inside the Glasner Studio, the sun’s rays would shimmer … in a kaleidoscope of tone … an iridescent jewel box, a sunset of every hue. The light would break apart into all the colors the eye could see and would come together and be made whole again.”

Dykstra’s drawings are beautifully detailed, thoughtful, charming and evocative.

The book takes us to many places in Chicago (the Towertown neighborhood, Century of Progress, Tavern Club, Old Town in the 1960s) and elsewhere, such as Paris. It introduces interesting people too, Rudolph Glaser, a millionaire patron who commissioned a home; photographer Paul Hansen; architect Andrew Rebori, Carl Sandburg, Lucy Montgomery, Fred Hampton, Margaret Burroughs, artists Bob Horn and Bob Meyer, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

It ends with Miller in his later years.

After the journey — Miller died 1993, his papers are housed at the Chicago History Museum — come a few pages which explain that “while nearly all of the major events depicted in the graphic novel happened in some way, creative liberties were taken regarding the exact order of the events and the characters involved.”

It goes on to detail which major episodes and settings were “reimagined” in the novel. These include Miller’s conversation with Sandburg at the Tavern Club; the meeting with Kahlo and Rivera, which almost surely did not take place in Chicago; an enlightening few words on the shattering of his business relationship with friend and real estate developer Sol Kogen; and further details of his two marriages.

There are also some pages devoted to Dykstra’s “artistic inspiration,” which tells us that since “this novel was an opportunity for Dykstra to create art that was about art, she utilized a variety of sources, creating a collage of references that included the works of Miller as well as his contemporaries.”

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I was suspicious of anything called a “graphic novel.” No more. That trouble was cured with 2023’s“Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century,” a collaboration between poet and Poetry magazine editor Adrian Matejka and artist Youssef Daoudi. I called it “a wonder of words and images. It could be called a graphic novel if that description didn’t fail to fully capture its cinematic visual and literary substance.”

This “A Total Work of Art” is also a stunner. It is published by the Edgar Miller Legacy, founded in 2014 to preserve, archive, and promote Miller’s work. Zac Bleicher is its founder and executive director as well as the editor of the book. He is a passionate man and tells me there is some fine Miller art on display now, as well as some of Dykstra’s, at a new Old Town gallery, Art on Sedgwick, not far from where Edgar Miller enriched the place where he once lived and where we live now.

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