De Casseres at the Blackstone Publishers, New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Dataĭe Casseres, Benjamin, 1873-1945. Box 459 Bowling Green Station New York, N.Y.

Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff called the volume 'a welcome tribute to individualism and defiance' and the poems themselves 'metaphysical meteors, searching, cataclysmic and rich in satire.'A review in The New York Times favorably compared De Casseres to Walt Whitman, claiming 'if his alien, highly individual genius remains unrecognized, criticism will lie upon the public, not upon him.'įantasia Impromptu: The Adventures of an Intellectual Faun (Part 3) By BENJAMIN DeCASSERES In 1915, De Casseres published his first book, a collection of poetry titled The Shadow-Eater, to mixed reviews.

In 1909, he signed onto a petition calling out the police departments of New York City, Brooklyn, Yonkers and East Orange for their respective activities in preventing anarchist Emma Goldman from speaking in those cities. At various times De Casseres defended free speech. In particular, he wrote about the effect of Prohibition on New York City, especially its ineffectiveness of actually preventing drinking. He used his position as a well-known editorialist to criticize, often satirically, prohibition policies. De Casseres held 'an aggressively individualist form of anarchist politics derived primarily from a discomfiting reading of Nietzsche.' His views on the idea of the Superman were influential on contemporary writers such as Eugene O'Neill, who called De Casseres an 'American Nietzsche' in the foreword to Anathema: Litanies of Negation, and Jack London, who wrote that 'no man in my own camp stirs me as does Nietzsche or as does De Casseres.'ĭe Casseres was also a staunch opponent of Prohibition. As a columnist, De Casseres routinely railed against socialism, communism, and other forms of collectivism, and he excoriated those who promoted such political structures. Those 23 were collected together in 1939 into this three volume set called The Works of Benjamin DeCasseres.ĭe Casseres described himself as an individualist anarchist. In the following three years, between 19, he published 23 booklets.

In 1936 Benjamin DeCasseres took it upon himself to try to publish as much of his own work as he could.

The Sublime Boy by Walter de Casseres