Henry Blake Fuller

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Henry Blake Fuller (January 9, 1857 – July 28, 1929) was a United States novelist and short story writer.

He was born and worked in Chicago, Illinois.

He is perhaps the first novelist from Chicago to gain national recognition.

His exploration of city life was seen as relavatory, and he was perhaps the first established American author to explore homosexuality in fiction later in his life.

Personal life

Fuller was born in Chicago on January 9, 1857. He never married. His journals from his teen years reveal that he was in love with some dormitory roommates at Allison Classical Academy. "I would come by twenty beautiful women to gaze on a handsome man" at the age of nineteen.

He wrote that he was in love with an adolescent boy with blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair at the age of 34. Fuller wrote and published At Saint Judas's, a short play about a homosexual who commits suicide at the wedding of his former lover five years ago. It has been credited as the first American play explicitly dealing with homosexuality. William Emery Shepherd, a 24-year-old college student, embarked on the last of his many European tours in 1924. Their letters do not indicate that their friendship was anything more than a friendship. Fuller, who continued writing literary reviews for a number of newspapers and magazines after returning to Chicago, as well as a book that was published posthumously, was utterly exhausted.

"At the home of Wakeman T. Ryan, with whom he had lived for the previous three years," Fuller died in Chicago on July 28, 1929. "Heart disease, which was exacerbated by the heat," his death was traced to "heart disease."

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Career

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 resemblance to Henry James's works, whose main aim was to compare 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 considered Fuller's work as a promising sign of a burgeoning literary culture in what was then largely the frontier city of Chicago.

Fuller then turned to literary realism, writing The Cliff-Dwellers (1893), which is perhaps the first novel set in Chicago's skyscrapers and frenetic corporate culture. The novel shocked and angered Chicago readers, who discovered that the book's unflattering portrait of the city jarring. Fuller's win was praised by influential scholar and novelist William Dean Howells, whose positive review helped to cement Fuller's status as a crucial regional realist. Howells' novels "The Cliff-Dwellers" and "With the Procession (1895) were inspired by the social realism of the late nineteenth century, although the scenes of violence in The Cliff-Dwellers contain elements of naturalism that would not be found in Howells' books. Despite the constant realism of The Cliff-Dwellers, the Procession was actually more in tune, with humor trumping its seriousness over. "Howells or James" refers to Fuller's choice for Howells over James in one of Fuller's most important unpublished essays.

In addition, the fuller produced twelve one-act plays, which were collected in The Puppet Booth (1896). He contributed to Poetry in the early years as a columnist, including The Dial, and he wrote for many journals, including The Dial.

Though he is one of Chicago's top novelists, his relationship to the area was often strained. He discovered the city's increasingly industrial and multicultural appeal. In The Cliff-Dwellers and With the Procession, both of which are set in Chicago, his ambivalence is displayed. The Cliff-Dwellers was one of the first books to explore at length social life in Chicago's new, skyscraper environment.

Bertram Cope's Year (191919), a subtle book about homosexuals, is perhaps his best work. After unsuccessfully making the rounds of several New York publishing houses, the author self-published the book in Chicago. It was held on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and it featured an appealing young English instructor who became the elusive object of desire for several young women and at least two men of various ages. Cope's most personal attachment is to his emoyne, who arrives in Evanston to attend Lemoyne until Lemoyne is banned from campus for making a backstage pass at another male student dressed as a woman. Cope's sexuality is discussed in the book's ambiguous conclusion. Criticisms who did not fully comprehend the book's satirical intentions were less enthusiastic. It enraged critics and angered his families. Its revival in 1998 had sparked raving reviews.

Fuller was also one of the founding members of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony in Illinois in 1898. He wrote a column on art criticism for the New York Evening Post.

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