Full Description
The Cliff-Dwellers was the first American realist novel to use the rapidly developing city of Chicago as its setting. Henry Blake Fuller's depiction of social climbing and human depravity among the "cliff-dwelling" residents and workers in the new Chicago skyscrapers shocked readers of the time, and influenced many American writers that followed. With its frenetic pace and many interrelated stories, it remains a compelling document of Chicago's social history, as well as a searing indictment of modern American life at the close of the nineteenth century.
The extensive appendices to this edition include Fuller's literary criticism and his correspondence about the novel, reviews, and visual and historical materials on turn-of-the-century Chicago and literary realism.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Henry Blake Fuller: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
The Cliff-Dwellers
Appendix A: Fuller's Correspondence about The Cliff-Dwellers
Minna Smith to Henry Blake Fuller (1893)
Henry Blake Fuller to Minna Smith (1893)
Henry Blake Fuller to Erastus Brainerd (1893)
Erastus Brainerd to Henry Blake Fuller (1893)
Hamlin Garland to Henry Blake Fuller (1894)
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen to Henry Blake Fuller (1894)
Henry Blake Fuller to William Dean Howells (1893)
Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews
William Morton Payne, The Dial (16 October 1893)
William Dean Howells, Harper's Bazar (28 October 1893)
Mary Abbott, Chicago Post (31 October 1893)
Laurence Hutton, Harper's New Monthly Magazine (November 1893)
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, Cosmopolitan (December 1893)
Atlantic Monthly (April 1894)
Appendix C: Fuller's Literary Commentary
"Howells or James?" (circa 1884)
From "A Plea for Shorter Novels," The Dial (30 August 1917)
From "My Early Books" (1919)
From Unpublished Review of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (circa 1920)
Appendix D: On Literary Realism
From Hamlin Garland, "Productive Conditions of American Literature," Forum (August 1894)
From Hamilton Wright Mabie, "A Typical Novel," Andover Review (November 1885)
Theodore Dreiser, "True Art Speaks Plainly," Booklovers Magazine (February 1903)
Appendix E: Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
From Henry Blake Fuller, "The Upward Movement in Chicago," Atlantic (October 1897)
"Chicago Manners," Harper's Weekly (29 July 1893)
From Henry Van Brunt, "The Columbian Exposition and American Civilization," Atlantic (May 1893)
From Julian Ralph, "Chicago—the Main Event," Harper's New Monthly Magazine (February 1892)
From Julian Ralph, "Chicago's Gentle Side," Harper's New Monthly Magazine (July 1893)
From Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
Appendix F: Skyscrapers
From Louis Sullivan, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," Lippincott's (March 1896)
From George Ade, "After the Skyscrapers, What?" (1912)
Henry Blake Fuller, "Architecture in America" (circa 1893)
Appendix G: Native Cliff-Dwellers
From Frederick Schwatka, "Land of the Living Cliff-Dwellers," Century (June 1892)
From H.C. Hovey, "Homes and Remains of the Cliff Dwellers," Scientific American (28 October 1893)
Appendix H: Other Illustrations
Restored Tower and Cliff-Houses (1887)
Photograph of Cliff Dwellers Exhibit, Columbian Exposition (1893)
"Vicinity of the Board of Trade" (1893)
"How It Might Be if the 6,000 People in the Monadnock Should Leave at One Time" (1896)
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