The Cliff-Dwellers
The Cliff-Dwellers was the first American realist novel to use the rapidly developing city of Chicago as its setting. 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…
Bertram Cope’s Year
In 1918, when Henry Blake Fuller was 62 years old, he completed the manuscript of a novel, Bertram Cope’s Year. Though Fuller was well known as an accomplished realist and had published twelve previous novels, this work was his first published fiction to address the topic of homosexuality. In the novel Bertram Cope, a handsome…
Glances Backward
Glances Backward brings together in one volume a broad selection of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American writings about gay male love, including love stories, Westerns, ghostly tales, poetry, drama, essays, letters, and memoirs. Many of these works, such as The Cult of the Purple Rose, the story of a gay alliance at 1890s Harvard, are…