The scope of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, which celebrated, albeit a year late, the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, ranged over many centuries, numerous nations and almost every type of human achievement. The 27 million people who came to the five months long Fair were able to see Grace Darling's boat or Spanish galleons of Columbus's time; they could follow the history of transport from coracles to cars; they could see the latest in Krupp's cannon and Bell's telephone in a classically styled Machinery Hall six times the size of the Coliseum. With the exception of Louis Sullivan's golden Transportation Pavilion, the buildings which housed the Fair, covered uniformly with staff, composed a classical ‘White City’, grouped round a complex of lagoons and fountains on Chicago's Lake Front.

The relative obscurity of Chicago's Henry Blake Fuller (1857–1929), a prolific essayist, journalist, reviewer and novelist, with collections of plays, poems and short stories to his name, in part derives from the difficulty of placing him: the work resists classification. His early fiction, for instance, reflects, debates and sometimes satirises the alternating influences of Howells and James. The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) and With the Procession (1895), “American” novels, are framed by such “European” fictions as The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani (1890) and Waldo Trench and Others: Stories of Americans in Italy (1908). His closet homosexual novel Bertram's Cope's Year (1919), a translation of Goldoni's The Fan (1925) and the non-fictional Gardens of this World (1929) testify to an incremental diversity. Characteristically, his last work, the posthumously published novel Not on the Screen (1930), which projects the interactive mimicry of “real” life and cinema, saw Fuller exploring fresh thematic and formal territory.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract