The Cliff-Dwellers | Page 2

battle fields or the depressing display of New York farm life by Harold Frederic. In short, the series admirably illustrates the general qual ities of the fiction produced in the United States during the era covered, just as it generously mirrors the geographical regions, the people, and the problems of the times.
PROFESSOR CLARENCE GOHDES Duke University December, 1967 Durham, North Carolina

HENRY B. FULLER
Hemy B. Fuller was born in Chicago in 1857. He attended the Chicago High School, and after graduation worked for a while in a bank. He then studied music and architecture in Europe. His first book, The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani (1890) is set in Italy, and has as its theme the comparison of European and American cultures. It became a best-seller, and went through five editions. Fuller wrote two sequels to this work: The Chatelaine of La Trinite (1892) and The Last Refuge (1900), neither of which were favorably received by the public. In 1899 Fuller published a volume of satirical verses attacking President McKinley and "other politicians. In 1901 and 1902 he contributed heavily to the book review section of the Chicago Evening Post, and in 1912-1913, to the editorial page of the Chicago Record-Herald. For several years Fuller wrote nothing. In 1929, the year of his death, appeared Gardens of this World, a collection of travel notes and philosophical reflections, which picks up the cosmopolitan theme which he first exploited in The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani.
Edmund Wilson said that Fuller was "superior as a novelist of manners to W. D. Howells," and Howells himself thought highly of Fuller's works. Alfred Kazin's remark that Fuller was "a graceful and impressionistic artist who was a realist, malgre lui" comes closest to summarizing this com plex and contradictory writer. For although Fuller's cosmopol itan American-European romances are charming, idealistic, and fanciful, the Cliff Dwellers is a scathing, satirical attack on greed and social striving. It is one of the first novels to use the monstrous, overgrown, and impersonal city as a setting, and Fuller was in fact responsible for the current use of the word "cliff dweller" to describe the inhabitants of huge urban apartment houses. He wrote at a time when Chicago was going through a period of rapid social change characterized by economic expansion, municipal corruption, and the rise of a nouveau riche class which social historians label as either "predatory" or "productive" depending on their viewpoint. It is this class which Fuller describes in the Cliff Dwellers. He sets the stage: he is a detached, ironic explorer who is telling the reader about a "new frontier;" a "rugged and erratic plateau of the Bad Lands (which) lies before him in all its hideousness and impracticability ... It is an airless country if by air we mean the mere combination of oxygen and nitrogen which is commonly indicated by that name. For here the medium of sight, sound, light, and life becomes largely carbonaceous, and the remoter peaks of this mighty yet unprepossessing landscape loom up grandly, cut vaguely, through swathing mists of coal-smoke." The dramatis personae who inhabit this wasteland are the bankers, stock brokers, clerks, and sundry employees and their families. They are not loveable people: Brainard, the head of the bank, has no friends, social relations of any kind, "no sense of any right relation to the community in which he lived," and lets his family run itself. McDowell is a crooked real estate man who thinks of himself as a poet of commerce, and is murdered by one of his victims.
Fuller's prose style is simple and matter-of-fact, and he keeps digressions to a minimum, allowing the story to carry itself; the reader draws his own conclusions.
This is a novel which, like Joseph Zalmonah, should be read by anyone who is interested in the development of the modern American city, and the influence of savage commercial competition upon both the weak and the strong.
PRINCIPAL WORKS: The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani, 1890; The Chatelaine of La Trinite, 1892; The Cliff Dwellers, 1893; With the Procession, 1805; From the Other Side: Stories of Transatlantic Travel, 1898; The New Flag, 1899; The Last Refuge: A Sicilian Romance, 1900; Lines Long and Short, 1917; Gardens of This World, 1929; Not on the Screen, 1930.
F. C. S.

THE CLIFF-DWELLERS
INTRODUCTION
BETWEEN the former site of old Fort Dear born and the present site of our newest Board of Trade there lies a restricted yet tumultu ous territory through which, during the course of the last fifty years, the rushing streams of commerce have worn many a deep and rugged chasm. These great canons conduits, in fact, for the leaping volume of an ever -increasing prosperity cross each other with a sort of sys tematic rectangularity, and in deference to the practical directness of local requirements they are in general called simply streets. Each of