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Fuller is by no means a well-known writer now, but he’s survived, at least, mostly on the reputation of The Cliff-Dwellers, a so-so realist satire about life in a Chicago skyscraper. It’s deservedly considered a minor work of the era–as Michael Miner wrote in 1994, “to know anything about it is to stand guilty of effete intellectual snobbery.”
Perhaps, but Chicagoans love their city, so the book has hung on as a period piece. A search of the Tribune‘s post-1984 archive finds him name-checked in an outstanding essay by Alfred Kazin on the city’s literature (worth the trouble of tracking down, which is free and easy if you have a library card), and Bill Granger wrote a short biographical sketch centering on The Cliff-Dwellers, which ran alongside an excerpt from that book in the Trib in 1996.
If Fuller hadn’t had subtlety thrust upon him, Bertram Cope’s Year could have turned out as insufferable as Kate Chopin’s proto-feminist novel The Awakening. Fuller’s natural style, as a person and as a writer, was dark reserve and light irony, and it simply didn’t work in the typical style and subject matter of the period.
