The Cliff-Dwellers | Page 2

Chopin and the grimmer realism of
Joseph Kirkland's own experiences on bloody Civil War 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