Henry Blake Fuller

Background

Henry Blake Fuller was born on January 9, 1857, in Chicago. His father, George Wood Fuller, cashier of the Home National Bank, was originally a New Yorker and his mother, Mary Josephine Sanford, came from Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Education

Fuller was educated in the city schools.

Career

After a brief business experience, Fuller spent a full year in Europe, taking his place in the succession of Americans from Irving onward whose enjoyment of European culture was heightened by the contrast between old Europe and new America. He made European sojourns, usually of six months each, in 1883, 1886, 1892, 1894, and 1896.

In the eleven-year period beginning with 1890, Fuller published eight volumes. In these volumes, there is a clear oscillation between cultured and courtly Europe and the raw Middle West. James G. Huneker speaks of him as the one “felicitous example of cosmopolitanism” to be classed with Henry James, but it was the Middle West to which he belonged and to which he was bound to return.

There were first two narratives located in Italy, then two novels of Chicago, a sort of pivot in the little collection of plays, two more books with a European background and a somewhat dispirited return to the United States. Throughout his career he was a resident of Chicago, never, apparently, attempting to alienate himself from his native city; and he made no visits to Europe between 1896 and his final brief trip in 1924.

The closeness of his connection with Chicago was shown in his cooperative literary activities. From the establishment of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912 to his death, he was a member of the advisory committee, reading copy, writing reviews, and frequently helping in the routine work of issuing the numbers.

Before this, in 1901-02, he helped shape the book-review section of the Chicago Evening Post, and he maintained from 1911 to 1913 a somewhat looser connection with thé Chicago Record-Herald as an editorial writer. With the turn of the century, the world seems to have been too much with this cosmopolite.

The events of the Spanish-American War and the development of American imperialism horrified him. In 1899, unable to secure a publisher, he privately printed The New Flag, a violent attack on President McKinley and his policies. Under the Skylights (1901) turned from the promise of Chicago’s vigor to the enervating influence of philistinism on potential art.

After a long interval there appeared in 1908 Waldo Trench, and Others; Stories of Americans in Italy, a series of mocking satires on negligible people. His Lines Long and Short (1917), biographical sketches in various rhythms, was directed by name at various figures in American public life.

Having none of his earlier suavity of tone, it was as mordant as Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology published two years earlier. From the entrance of the United States into the World War until the end of his career, Fuller was content to lead the quiet life of a semi-recluse bachelor, seen here and there in the neighborhood of the University of Chicago, yet always shyly aloof.

The last six months of his life were marked by an extraordinary return of creative energy. Stimulated by some of his friends, he undertook to resume the thread of his first book. In January 1929 he wrote and transcribed a volume of over 50, 000 words, with the title Gardens of this World, reviving some of the characters of his earliest work and introducing, in his own words, a lot of “new folks. ”

In February, he swung to the Chicago type of story, and between then and April completed a somewhat longer work, Not on the Screen, a combined picture of social life and satire of screen scenario construction. In the following summer he was stricken with a fatal illness, only six weeks before the announced publication of Gardens and before he had even had the opportunity to see the first proofs of Not on the Screen, which was published in the winter (1930) following his death.

Achievements

• Fuller wrote twelve one-act plays, collected in The Puppet Booth (1896). He wrote for various journals, including The Dial, and he provided some editorial assistance to Poetry in its early years. Perhaps his finest achievement is the controversial Bertram Cope's Year (1919), a subtle novel about homosexuals. In 2000, Fuller was posthumously inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame for his contributions to gay literature.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Works of Henry Blake Fuller

    (4 works of Henry Blake Fuller American novelist and short...)

  • The Cliff-Dwellers

    ( The Cliff-Dwellers was the first American realist nove...)

  • From the other side : stories of transatlantic travel (1898)
  • Bertram Cope's Year
  • With the Procession
  • On the Stairs
  • Under the Skylights

Membership

Fuller was one of the founding members of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony in Illinois.

Personality

Fuller's journals from his teenage days make it clear he was in love with some dormitory roommates at Allison Classical Academy. At the age of nineteen, he wrote in an imaginary personal advertisement: "I would pass by twenty beautiful women to look upon a handsome man".

At the age of 34, he wrote that he was 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 former lover. It is credited with being the first American play dealing explicitly with homosexuality.

In 1924, Fuller embarked upon the last of his many European tours with William Emery Shepherd, a 24-year-old college student. Their letters do not indicate their relationship was anything but a friendship.

Connections

Fuller never married.

Father:

George Wood Fuller

Mother:

Mary Josephine Sanford

References

• A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller (Critical Essays in Modern Literature)