Author Fuller Henry Blake

the important novelists of Chicago's early years, his own relation to the city was often strained. The scion of one of Chicago's early settler families, he found the increasingly industrial and multicultural nature of the city offputting. His ambivalence is expressed in The Cliff-Dwellers and With the Procession, both of which are set in Chicago. Nevertheless, The Cliff-Dwellers, which is set in a high rise office building, is one of the first novels to treat at length social life in the new, skyscraper environment that was pioneered in Chicago. His finest achievement, however, is Bertram Cope's Year (1919), a subtle novel about homosexuals in Chicago and a love affair between Cope and Arthur Lemoyne, which ends with Cope turning heterosexual. It puzzled critics and embarrassed his friends. Its recent republication and enthusiastic reviews finally gave it the serious attention it deserves. Little is known with any certainty about Fuller's private life and relationships, although his journals from his teenage days make it clear he was in love with some dormitory roommates at Allison Classical Academy. At the age of 19 he wrote an imaginary personal advertisement in which he says, "I would pass by twenty beautiful women to look upon a handsome man". At the age of 34 he admitted to being in love with an adolescent boy who had blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair. Five years later, Fuller wrote and published a short play, At Saint Judas's, about a homosexual who commits suicide at the wedding of his fomer lover. It is credited with being the first American play dealing explicitly with homosexuality. In 1924 Fuller embarked upon a final affair with a college student named William Shepherd, with whom he went to live in Europe. [1] Fuller was also one of the founding members of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony in Illinois.