American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

So it was in Robert Reitzel’s radical weekly newspaper Der ArmeTeufel (The Poor Devil) that Emma Goldman first learned of Nietzsche.22 It was in the anarchist publisher and Manhattan bookstore proprietor Benjamin Tucker’s Unique Book Shop that the seventeen-year-old Eugene O’Neill first encountered Nietzsche.23 And it was through the literary critic James Huneker’s tireless promotion of Nietzsche in his Musical Courier articles and collections of essays that the young Baltimore newspaper reporter H. L. Mencken became acquainted with the thinker who would come to dominate his own intellectual biography.24 Although their political commitments varied, American anarchists, romantic radicals, and literary cosmopolitans celebrated Nietzsche’s philosophical assault on modern slavishness and his emphasis on the unfettered ego as a source of human progress.