UNLIMITED Audiobooks and eBooks

Over 40,000 books & works on all major devices

Get ALL YOU CAN for FREE for 30 days!

Bertram Cope's Year

Henry Blake Fuller

Book Overview: 

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 carefuly 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.

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.

How does All You Can Books work?

All You Can Books gives you UNLIMITED access to over 40,000 Audiobooks, eBooks, and Foreign Language courses. Download as many audiobooks, ebooks, language audio courses, and language e-workbooks as you want during the FREE trial and it's all yours to keep even if you cancel during the FREE trial. The service works on any major device including computers, smartphones, music players, e-readers, and tablets. You can try the service for FREE for 30 days then it's just $19.99 per month after that. So for the price everyone else charges for just 1 book, we offer you UNLIMITED audio books, e-books and language courses to download and enjoy as you please. No restrictions.

Book Excerpt: 
. . .If they insist, leave your voice behind; but do bring your hands and your reading eye. Don't let me go along making my new circle think I'm an utter dub. Tell your father plainly that he can never in the world make a wholesale- hardware-man out of you. Force him to listen to reason. What is one year spent in finding out just what you are fit for? Come along; I miss you like the devil; nobody does my things as sympathetically as you do. Give up your old anthems and your old tinware and tenpennies and come along. I can bolt from this hole at a week's notice, and we can go into quarters together: a real bed instead of an upholstered shelf, and a closet big enough for two wardrobes (if mine really deserves the name). We could get our own breakfast, and you could take a course in something or other till you found out just what the Big Town could do for you. In any event you would be bearing me company, and your company is what I need. So pack up and appear."

Read More

Community Reviews

There are two kinds of forgotten writer. One is vaguely remembered when perusing a book shelf or in passing conversation. Hamlin Garland – didn’t he write about farmers? Or maybe William Dean Howells – didn’t he used to be considered one of America’s greatest writers? This is a precarious and perhap

I find it hard to believe that this book was written in 1919. More unbelievable still is that the author, Henry Fuller Blake, praised by many of his more illustrious contemporaries such as Thornton Wilder and Booth Tarkington, sank into almost total obscurity.

This novel is an utter delight. It tells

Written in 1919, this novel explores a delicate topic without ever mentioning it. Bertram Cope is a friendly attractive young college instructor, more interested in his musical theatre friend than in the young women he is constantly paired with. An obliging and polite escort, Bertram accidentally be

Bertram Cope is squeezed from all sides. An English instructor, age 24, at NoWestern U - smart, polite with a fine sense of punctilio and too much charm - he arouses the passions of three coeds, a society hostess and a bachelor in his 50s who mentors likely chaps. Can Bertram get through the year, w

The subtlety with which the novel is written is what really makes the book so exceptional. Nothing is ever directly said or written about Bertram's status and the male friend he lives with. Their entire relationship is written and described as a string of innuendos and very subtle ambiguous physical

My full video review is on my BookTube channel: https://youtu.be/mOAnJW6KcZk.

This 1919 American novel by the now-forgotten Chicagoan writer Henry Blake Fuller portrays gay male life so subtly that few of its contemporary readers and reviewers had the foggiest what it was all about. They weren't outr

View More Reviews