Bertram Cope’s Year

In 1919, when he was sixty-two, Henry Blake Fuller published “Bertram Cope’s Year.” This audacious book with several homosexual characters revolves around a young English instructor in a middle western university town patterned on Evanston, Illinois. Rejected by every New York publisher, Fuller self-published and the book received scant notice or unintelligent reviews. Discouraged, Fuller burned the original manuscript. It took ten years before he ventured to publish another novel.
James Huneker, Fuller’s contemporary, loved “Bertram Cope’s Year.” He read it three times and wrote to Fuller, “Its portraiture and psychological storkes fill me with envy and joy… you are the implacable Stendhal of the lake!”
Fifty years later, critic Edmund Wilson, in a “New Yorker” article on Henry Blake Funner entitled “The Art of Making It Flat, ” called “Bertram Cope’s Year” Fuller’s best book. He wrote, “It has a philosophic theme … which raises it well above the fiction of social surfaces of the school of William Dean Howells.”
This Turtle Point Press edition is the first republication of “Bertram Cope’s Year” since 1919.