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On the Stairs

Downloads: 100+
First published: 1918
Pages: 171

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About this book

Two boys pass each other on the staircase of Grant's Private Academy in 1873, and in 1916 they pass again on the marble stairs of a bank, their positions reversed. Johnny McComas starts with nothing but method and nerve and rises to the presidency of the Mid-Continent National Bank. Raymond Prince starts with money, taste and a hundred half-finished enthusiasms, and goes steadily down. Fuller never names the city, though the Loop and a fire that had swept the town mark it as Chicago. He hands the telling to a classmate who watched both men for forty years and talks straight at the reader, waving off the romantic turns a reader expects. Fuller called the result less a novel than a sketch for one. What is left is a dry reckoning of what ambition costs and what it actually buys.

About the author

Henry Blake Fuller

Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929) was an American novelist and critic based in Chicago, known for realist fiction such as 'The Cliff-Dwellers.' A quiet, private figure, he wrote works both cosmopolitan and regional and is now recognized for his early, candid treatment of gay life.