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.