FULLER, HENRY BLAKE. Autograph manuscript of the first four chapters of an untitled and unfinished novel that prefigures his Bertram Cope's Year. [Chicago, n.d.]. 77 pages, 8vo, in ink on rectos of lined sheets with an occasional correction or revision, first and last pages a bit browned and with some slight blank marginal chipping, loose in notebook wrappers, with chapter page count in Fuller's hand in ink on front cover. "An earlier conception of the subject that resulted in Bertram Cope's Year. Basil Randolph appears delicately in the role of a man jealous of his men friends"--Griffin, Henry Blake Fuller, p. 105 (recording this manuscript). In Bertram Cope's Year (Chicago, 1919) -- the first American novel dealing with the theme of homosexuality -- Basil Randolph is a major character, "a graying 'scholar manqué'...who 'would have enjoyed knowing, and knowing intimately,' a few select young men [Bertram Cope being the leading one] at" the university which is the setting for the novel (John Pilkington, Jr., Henry Blake Fuller, New York: Twayne, 1970, p. 150). In the published novel Randolph loses Cope to a younger rivel, Arthur Lemoyne.