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.