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1Bertram Cope's Year

By Henry Blake Fuller

This novel was perhaps the most daring and affirmative LGBT literature of the first two decades of the 20th century in America. In this story, Bertram Cope is a young college instructor, about twenty-four years old ("certainly not a day over twenty-five"), who is pursued by men and women, both younger and older than himself. In writing this novel, Fuller had to carefully craft his plot schemes so as not to offend the sensibilities of publishers. As a result, today's reader is left somewhat, but not entirely, confused about the precise feelings that characters develop for one another by the end of the book. Nevertheless, no publishing house would touch it, which ultimately required that Fuller go the self-publishing route.<br><br> Bertram Cope's Year was the first novel by an established American writer that dealt exclusively with the subject of homosexuality. Although it did not achieve the notariety it deserved at the time, it set the tone for the increasingly open discussion of gay themes in literary form. (Introduction by James K. White)

2Woman in the Nineteenth Century

By Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was an American feminist, writer, and intellectual associated with the Transcendentalist movement. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. Her life was short but full. She became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1840, before joining the staff of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley in 1844. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a reputation as the best-read person in New England, male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College. Her seminal work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was published in 1845. A year later, she was sent to Europe for the Tribune as its first female correspondent. She soon became involved with the revolutions in Italy and allied herself with Giuseppe Mazzini. She had a relationship with Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child. All three members of the family died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, as they were traveling to the United States in 1850. Fuller's body was never recovered. This project collects her most famous work along with shorter pieces and extracts from her journals and letters. (Summary by Wikipedia and Elizabeth Klett)

3Cliff-Dwellers

By Henry Blake Fuller

Between the former site of old Fort Dearborn and the present site of our newest Board of Trade there lies a restricted yet tumultuous territory through which, during the course of the last fifty years, the rushing streams of commerce have worn many a deep and rugged chasm. These great canons—conduits, in fact, for the leaping volume of an ever-increasing prosperity—cross each other with a sort of systematic rectangularity, and in deference to the practical directness of local requirements they are in general called simply—streets. Each of these canons is closed in by a long frontage of towering cliffs, and these soaring walls of brick and limestone and granite rise higher and higher with each succeeding year, according as the work of erosion at their bases goes onward—the work of that seething flood of carts, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, cars, messengers, shoppers, clerks, and capitalists, which surges with increasing violence for every passing day. Summary by HENRY B. FULLER

Margaret Fuller, the American early proponent for Women's rights, writes of her visits to the Great Lakes in the summer of 1843. - Summary by KevinS

5Brave Men and Women: Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs

By Osgood E. Fuller

Brave Men and Women is a collection of stories about historical figures who, through success and failure, made an impact on their world. As noted in the Preface, the author's aim "has simply been to form a sort of mosaic or variegated picture of the Brave Life - the life which recognizes the Divine Goodness in all things, striving through good report and evil report, and in manifold ways, which one is often unqualified to judge, to attain to the life of Him who is 'the light of the world'." - Summary by Kristin Hand

6Alley Cat’s Kitten

By Caroline Fuller

"The Alley Cat took no pride in her own appearance. Indeed, it had been said when she was born that her mother, the blooded tortoise-shell of a beautiful home, had never produced such a terrible kitten. She would not have been allowed to live, if an accident had not deprived her mother of the others. And as she grew up even her own parent saw that she was homely.<br><br> It may be thought that homely cats have no feelings; but this is not the case, for homely cats, like plain people, are sensitive, and have even more feelings than others. So one day when some particularly unkind remark had been made about the brindled kitten with yellow sides, she left her home and ran away to become an alley cat." - Summary by the author

Sketches of a family's life in a New England suburb at the end of the nineteenth century. - Summary by Beeswaxcandle