In his essay, "The Great American Novel" (1932), Theodore Dreiser remarked that "if there is such a person as the father of American realism, Henry B. Fuller is that man." In With the Procession (1895), Dreiser said, Fuller "introduced for the first time the purely American realistic novel" in which "we are permitted to glimpse the true Chicago American scene of the day." While making these assertions, Dreiser rejected Henry James as "too narrowly and thinly class-conscious" and William Dean Howells as "too socially indifferent and worse, uninformed." Although these judgments on Howells and James may be questioned and that of Fuller understood as applicable to only a portion of his work, Dreiser properly placed Fuller among the pioneers of realism in American literature and, perhaps unknowingly, raised issues which lie at the center of Fuller's relationship to life and to literature.

"I was born and brought up in Chicago...