This is a repost, ’cause I think it’s interesting
In the early 20th century Henry Blake Fuller was one of Chicago’s most famous writers, with a number of prominent realist novels under his belt and friendships with leading lights such as Thornton Wilder, Jane Addams, and Carl Van Vechten. He worked for the Saturday Evening Post, the Chicago Evening Post, and the Chicago Record Herald and wrote essays and reviews for the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times, and the New York Herald Tribune.
In 1919, at the age of 62, he published his masterpiece, Bertram Cope’s Year, a dark social comedy about thinly veiled homosexual romance at an even more thinly veiled Northwestern University. And it failed—like, Moby Dick-level failure. Fuller burned the manuscripts and pledged never to write fiction again, a promise he kept until the year before his death.