Bertram Cope's Year
Henry Blake Fuller
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, May 26, 2017)
"An entertaining satirical novel (set in a thinly camouflaged Evanston, Ill), that was written and published nearly 80 years ago by a once well-regarded but now nearly forgotten Chicago novelist and poet, Henry Blake Fuller. Modern readers may be reminded of several novels and films its main themes foreshadow: 'The Object of My Affection,' 'Stephen McCauley's account of a young woman who falls in love with a gay teacher. 'Something for Everyone,' in which Michael York plays an amoral hustler who erotically manipulates an entire household, Pasolini's brilliant 'Teoreme,' featuring Terence Stamp as a seductive stranger who beds every member of a bourgeois household....Audacious for its time, 'Bertram Cope's Year' was either ignored or misunderstood when it was first published, with few copies sold. Discouraged, Fuller burned both the original manuscript and the remaining unbound proofs. 'There seems to be no way,' he wrote his friend Hamlin Garland, 'for one to get read or paid, so - Shutters up.' It is a pleasure to have those shutters taken back down to reveal an engaging and quite undeservedly neglected comedy of bad manners.' -The New York Times "Mr. H. B. Fuller's realism is the real thing; in seeming to register it interprets and portrays. Therefore your initial reservations as to Bertram Cope's importance or salience as a subject may well have been forgotten if not consciously withdrawn when the full portrait is before you. he is a nice clean boy of the midlands who not long after his respectable graduation returns to his old university for what turns out to be a single year's service as instructor....He is tolerably successful with his work and happy in it, but we have chiefly concerned with his extra-professional experiences." -The Weekly Review "A welcome addition to the series of studies of American life and character which have come all too intermittently and charily from the hand of Henry B. Fuller....The kind of novel which must be enjoyed not for its matter so much as for its quality, its richness of texture and subtlety of atmosphere. It has distinction, is as finely wrought in its way as a Howells novel or a Cable." -The Bookman "Marked by sly satire of people and things....Mr. Fuller is a prolific writer who clothes his thoughts in pleasing language." -The Baptist