The Cliff-Dwellers was the first American realist novel to use the rapidly developing city of Chicago as its setting. Henry Blake Fuller’s depiction of social climbing and human depravity among the “cliff-dwelling” residents and workers in the new Chicago skyscrapers shocked readers of the time, and influenced many American writers that followed. With its frenetic pace and many interrelated stories, it remains a compelling document of Chicago’s social history, as well as a searing indictment of modern American life at the close of the nineteenth century. The extensive appendices to this edition include Fuller’s literary criticism and his correspondence about the novel, reviews, and visual and historical materials on turn-of-the-century Chicago and literary realism.

In this trilogy of connected stories and linked characters that collide with each other's lives over 600 years of America's history, a permanently damaged amnesiac from the Vietnam War, living as a hermit in the bluffs of the Buffalo National River in Arkansas, profoundly influences numerous people whose lives he never really touches. The first is Sarah Pingree, an artist who falls to her death from the bluffs. Her brother, Corey, an undercover wildlife agent from up-State New York, arrives to investigate the mysterious circumstances, and discovers Zach. Their connection is fleeting but compelling for both. Zach leaves his cave after years of solitude to hitchhike across the country in search of something he doesn't understand, while Corey ends up in the American Southwest searching for looters of Anasazi ruins. Then Zach's tragic death on the road becomes a national news story thanks to investigative reporter Amanda Cousins who is able to resurrect the final year of his life by contacting some of the people he met during his journey. Her connection with Corey Pingree becomes a pivotal event in both of their lives, giving a special meaning to the tragedy of Zach. WILL La PAGE is the author of three collections of poetry, "A Park is a Poem on the Land," "Along the Buffalo," and "Voices from the Park," and two collections of essays, "Parks for Life" and "The Ecology of Belief and The Paradox of Public Parks." "Cliff Dwellers" is his first novel. His work as a park system administrator, consultant, lecturer, and scientist, has taken him to South Africa, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and across North and Central America to a place where parks are truly universal: the heart.