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Henry B[lake] Fuller
Personal Information
Description
Henry Blake Fuller was a United States novelist and short story writer, born in Chicago, Illinois. Fuller's earliest works were travel romances set in Italy that featured allegorical characters. Both The Chevalier of Pensieri–Vani (1890) and The Châtelaine of La Trinité (1892) bear some thematic resemblance to the works of Henry James, whose primary interest was in the contrast between American and European ways of life. Fuller's first two books appealed to the genteel tastes of cultivated New Englanders such as Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell, who took Fuller's work as a promising sign of a burgeoning literary culture in what was then still largely the frontier city of Chicago.
Books
The cliff-dwellers
Wrote Carl Smith: "The Cliff-Dwellers is a master work of Chicago and American urban realism. Henry Blake Fuller had no equal in understanding the complex human dynamics of the transformations that accompanied the creation of modern city life, including the vague but vivid hopes these changes inspired and the confusion and disappointments they inflicted. The novel is a brilliant realization of the social life and mentality of this place and time." Another reviewer noted: "Henry Blake Fuller's depiction of social climbing and human depravity among the 'cliff-dwelling' residents and workers in the new Chicago skyscrapers shocked readers of the time, and influenced many American writers that followed. With its frenetic pace and many interrelated stories, it remains a compelling document of Chicago's social history, as well as a searing indictment of modern American life at the close of the nineteenth century."
Bertram Cope's Year
Bertram Cope's Year is a 1919 novel by Henry Blake Fuller, sometimes called the first American homosexual novel. The story is set in the present on the campus of a university in fictional Churchton, Illinois, modeled on Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where Bertram Cope, an attractive young English instructor, is spending a year completing his thesis. While he has a certain sophistication, he is socially unaware, easily impressed by the wealthy and their comforts. Lacking confidence, Cope is too careful and self-conscious as he tries to find his place in local society. Cope becomes the elusive object of desire, either social or sexual or some combination of the two, for an older woman, two older men, and three young women. Cope's primary emotional attachment is to his college chum Arthur Lemoyne, who comes to live with him. Their relationship appears to end after Lemoyne, acting the female part in a play, makes a physical advance backstage that offends another male student.