With the Procession

by Henry Blake Fuller

Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929) was an American novelist and short story writer, born and raised in Chicago. He tried his hand at both realistic and fanciful writing styles, but his realism is said to have been more influential. His first novel, The Cliff- Dwellers (1893) is often called America's first 'urban novel' focusing on inner-city life and examining the lives of Chicago apartment-dwellers. While he is considered one of the important novelists of Chicago's early years, his own relation to the city was often strained. The scion of one of Chicago's early settler families, he found the increasingly industrial and multicultural nature of the city offputting. His finest achievement, is Bertram Cope's Year, first published in 1919, which contains at its heart the bittersweet story of Edmund Cope, a young English Professor who arrives in a Mid-West University town and is taken in by a society of genteel eccentrics.

Genres: Fiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1894

About the author

Henry Blake Fuller (January 9, 1857–July 28, 1929) was a United States novelist and short story writer, born in Chicago, Illinois.

Fuller's earliest works were travel romances set in Italy that featured allegorical characters. Both The Chevalier of Pensieri–Vani (1890) and The Châtelaine of La Trinité (1892) bear some thematic resemblance to the works of Henry James, whose primary interest was in the contrast between American and European ways of life. Fuller's first two books appealed to the genteel tastes of cultivated New Englanders such as Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell, who took Fuller's work as a promising sign of a burgeoning literary culture in what was then still largely the frontier city of Chicago.

Reviews

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this little book primarily because it fit the needs of a reading challenge that I'm participating in, but I'm glad to have stumbled upon it. The book traces the efforts of the family of David Marshall to maintain their position in elite Chicago society as Chicago becomes a modern and industrial city in the 1890s.

The description of the characters losing their integrity as they try to find a place in the shifting social fashions of the day felt surprisingly fresh and contemporary. Reading about the second son dropping out of college to be a general layabout, flitting through Europe and back again isn't much different than the stories of some of my college classmates who had the family funding to support efforts to "find themselves" through extended periods of unemployment. Meanwhile, the older son becomes a lawyer and doggedly pursues increased prominence and wealth. Again, I saw the modern counterparts perfectly clearly in these century-old depictions.

I'm glad to have stumbled upon this one. I'd never heard of this author or this book before calling it up from the state library system.

[Lynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This seemed like it was supposed to be a sweeping allegory about an ill-fated patriarch, an American businessman in the early industrial days of Chicago, who builds and then loses his business. His children, representing I suppose the new generation of Americans, are to different degrees ungrateful and immoral, and become snobs. I guess the less snobby daughter, Jane, was supposed to be a kind of protagonist and redeeming figure, but she wasn't much better or more interesting that the others. In the narration, it is said multiple times that Jane is really the driving force in the action and the person who holds the family together, but I didn't see that this was the case at all. If there was supposed to be irony or humor in this or other discrepancies, I didn't get it. When there was disparity between thought and action, it just seemed like the result of sloppy characterization and inconsistent writing.

[Elizabeth Lund · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this because of the Chicago setting. The middlebrow social scene and the author's amused attitude towards his characters are faintly reminiscent of Jane Austen. I think the author meant to criticize the "procession"; in the end, I thought the change in the family was not necessarily for the worse.