This chapter traces the career of Henry Blake Fuller from the 1890s through the opening of the twentieth century. Fuller, a scion of one of the city’s first families and student of Chicago’s social networks and institutions, began by writing travel romances set in the Italian past. Turning quickly to literary realism, he depicted the rapidly expanding city of his birth, becoming arguably the first Midwestern writer to set his novels in the tumultuous environment of the growing metropolis. Fuller’s novels The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) and With the Procession (1895) were unvarnished critiques of Chicagoans’ materialist priorities, social ambitions, and unethical business practices, as well as the psychological and communal fractures caused by the accelerated pace of the city. Applying the structural principles of architecture to new methods of narration, Fuller’s novels of this period represent stylistic and conceptual differences between his practice of realism and that of his better-known contemporaries. The chapter also discusses Fuller’s long-standing interest in the Chicago art scene in books like Under the Skylights (1901), in which art and commerce struggle for primacy.

The only surviving Byzantine image of the horseman inhabits an ominous and foreboding landscape. The unique image appears in an illustrated version of the Book of Job. The horseman presides over a darkly emotional and philosophically rich scene (Vat. Gr. 751, fol. 26r). The artist who created this image transported the horseman back in time to have it preside over the darkest moment in the trials of virtuous Job caught up in a contest between forces far greater than himself. Given that the motif of fall permeates the Book of Job, our image metaphorically envisions a bitter estrangement from the Queen of Cities. In this unique image of Job, Justinian’s column is multivalent. It is both triumphal and tragic. If it were not juxtaposed with Job’s suffering it would seem celebratory. However, the juxtaposition is central. The horseman is poised to witness how the righteous suffer as a result of a cosmic battle between good and evil. Either the manuscript’s creator was very prescient in forecasting Job-like tribulations for Constantinople or he was operating with hindsight at some point after the Crusader capture of Constantinople in 1204.