SOURCE: “Two Neglected American Novelists: I—Henry B. Fuller, The Art of Making It Flat,” in The New Yorker, May 23, 1970, pp. 112-39.

In the following essay, Wilson provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Fuller's work.

The nineties and the early nineteen-hundreds, when looked at from the later decades, are likely to seem a dim period in American literature. The quality and the content of the fiction were mainly determined by the magazines that aimed to please a feminine public. There were writers of great reputation whom no one except the literary historian would think of looking into today. But there did exist also—outsold and outpublicized—a kind of underground of real social critics and conscientious artists who were hardly recognized or who were recognized only when one of them struck off some book that was daring or arresting enough to call special attention to its author...