author
Henry Blake Fuller
1857–1929
A sharp-eyed Chicago novelist, he helped turn the fast-growing modern city into serious American fiction. His best-known work, The Cliff-Dwellers, is often remembered as an early landmark of the urban novel.
5 Audiobooks
Bertram Cope's Year
by Henry Blake Fuller
The Cliff-Dwellers: A Novel
by Henry Blake Fuller
With the Procession
by Henry Blake Fuller
Under the Skylights
by Henry Blake Fuller
On the Stairs
by Henry Blake Fuller
About the author
Born in Chicago on January 9, 1857, Henry Blake Fuller became one of the first novelists to give the city a major place in American literature. Critics often single out The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) as an early and important city novel, and much of his fiction returned to Chicago's streets, buildings, ambitions, and social tensions.
Fuller first wrote romances set in Europe, but he became best known for fiction that observed modern urban life with realism and satire. Books such as With the Procession, Under the Skylights, and On the Stairs continued his long conversation with his hometown and its changing culture.
Later readers have also valued him for work that pushed against the limits of his era. His 1919 novel Bertram Cope's Year is often noted as an early American novel to treat homosexual themes with unusual openness. He died on July 28, 1929, leaving behind a body of work that helped define Chicago as a literary city.