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Henry Blake Fuller
(January 9, 1857 - July 28, 1929) U.S.A.

Henry Fuller

Novelist

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Henry Blake Fuller is a Chicago original. In fact, he was born here, which was a quite unusual for the era of Chicago's history when he lived in town - the period of Chicago's exponential growth. That meant that most Chicagoans were newcomers. Fuller had seen Chicago grow, burn, and grow some more. Yet he was not one of those Chicago Boosters the city was then noted for. In his writings he laments the inhumane aspects of the money-making, commercial side of Chicago, best illustrated in his novel The Cliff Dwellers, called the first important American novel having urban city-life as its focus.

Biographical and literary writers that critique Fuller's work skip over his gay nature. One author, Kenneth Scambray in "A Varied Harvest: the life and works of Henry Blake Fuller", however, treats the 'homosexuality' topic in detail, explaining what other reviewers were either oblivious to or simply ignored:

If Henry Fuller failed to reform the overriding materialism of his hometown, he suffered an even greater personal failure in his inability as a homosexual to integrate his personal and artistic lives. The record of this struggle is revealed in a series of documents, published and unpublished, that span his entire life as a writer.

The first is a revealing unpublished memoir begun when Fuller was eighteen years old, entitled "Allison Classical Academy." Allison was a boarding school in Wisconsin where Fuller spent his first year of high school... In the course of his writing career, Fuller did write publicly about his homosexuality... his first overt public treatment of the homosexual theme came in "At Saint Juda's," a one-act play published among eleven others in The Puppet Booth (1896)...

Fuller did not write publicly on the theme again for nearly thirty years, until the publication of Bertram Cope's Year (1919). When Fuller finished the manuscript and circulated it in New York, none of his would dare bring the novel out for him. Though he could ill afford it, he finally printed the novel at his own expense. If inattention to a novel because of its controversial content constitutes suppression, then Bertram Cope's Year was suppressed by periodicals and most newspapers of the day. (op. cit. pp. 8-9, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987)

Scambray discusses and interprets Fuller's early life, based upon the Allison diaries. Here we find a Fuller that doesn't quite fit with the straight social courtship customs; Fuller is quite aware of this and also of his same-sex affections (to what level of explicit self-consciousness isn't quite clear). Later in his life, by way of writing letters published in the Chicago Tribune, going by the pseudonym Harry B. Free, Fuller points up the perils of (straight) marriage as he saw them. By that time, it is probably safe to say he knew his orientation in a rational or analytical sense as opposed to a boyish preference.

In about anything else you might read about Fuller, homosexuality is scarcely, if at all, mentioned. You might find a word about it at most. The cover-up, so to speak, extends also to critical reviews of Bertram Cope's Year long after the novel's original release. One reviewer in the 'thirties, for instance, skimmed over the subject matter and concluded that the novel lacked a point. Whether that was a deliberate berating due to the subject matter, or due to not being able to tune in to the subject matter is unclear. Creeping disapproval of the same-sex relationship topics of the novel, however, is evident.

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