Bertram Cope's Year

About this book

Bertram Cope's Year is a 1919 novel by Henry Blake Fuller, sometimes called the first American homosexual novel. The story is set in the present on the campus of a university in fictional Churchton, Illinois, modeled on Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where Bertram Cope, an attractive young English instructor, is spending a year completing his thesis. While he has a certain sophistication, he is socially unaware, easily impressed by the wealthy and their comforts. Lacking confidence, Cope is too careful and self-conscious as he tries to find his place in local society. Cope becomes the elusive object of desire, either social or sexual or some combination of the two, for an older woman, two older men, and three young women. Cope's primary emotional attachment is to his college chum Arthur Lemoyne, who comes to live with him. Their relationship appears to end after Lemoyne, acting the female part in a play, makes a physical advance backstage that offends another male student.

Themes & subjects

About the author

Henry Blake Fuller

9 January 1857 – 28 July 1929

Henry Blake Fuller 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 Chic…