The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
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This article is about the book by H. L. Mencken. For Nietzsche's philosophy, see Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is a book by H. L. Mencken, the first edition in 1907. The book covers both wider and lesser known areas of Friedrich Nietzsche's
life and philosophy, notable both for its suggestion of Mencken's
still-developing literary talents at the age of 27 and for its
impressive detail as a book written in the United States (on only the
seventh year of Nietzsche's death) considering the lack of reliable
interpretations of Nietzsche in the American sphere of letters at the
time; Mencken prepared for writing this book by reading all of
Nietzsche's published philosophy, including several works in the original German.[1][2]
Contents |
Literary reception
Some of the book's biographical details, despite the best available information at the time, are now known to be false, yet Mencken's examination is accurate, as indeed are his personal translations of Nietzsche (for which one may see his translation of The Antichrist as a salient example); while his own feelings at times—and it would seem quite innocently and unintentionally — "muddy the water" of trying to interpret Nietzsche through Mencken (due to, for example, Mencken's own social Darwinism), his study of Nietzsche is objective on the whole, even allowing for his enthusiasm for Nietzsche.Due to this broad and close style of examination, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche may very well be where "Nietzsche Studies" earnestly began in America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Book_of_Prefaces
A Book of Prefaces
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- For the book by Alasdair Gray see The Book of Prefaces
The book was short, a brief eighty pages divided into four essays. The four subjects included Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Conrad and James Gibbons Huneker.
But perhaps the most important, and certainly the most outspoken essay was entitled "Puritanism as a Literary Force," during which he alleged that William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain were victims of the Puritan spirit.
"The Puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution-- these things have put an almost unbearable burden up on the exchange of ideas in the United States."
Mencken had criticized Puritanism for many years, famously characterizing it as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," but through World War I his criticism became increasingly outspoken, in part due to the rising tide of Prohibition.
Mencken's book triggered the imagination of a famous American author. As a teen first entering the world of reading and books in the early 1920s, Richard Wright found literary inspiration in A Book of Prefaces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Language
The American Language
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Mencken was inspired by "the argot of the colored waiters" in Washington, as well as one of his favorite authors, Mark Twain, and his experiences on the streets of Baltimore. In 1902, Mencken remarked on the "queer words which go into the making of 'United States.'" The book was preceded by several columns in The Evening Sun. Mencken eventually asked "Why doesn't some painstaking pundit attempt a grammar of the American language... English, that is, as spoken by the great masses of the plain people of this fair land?"
In the tradition of Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary, Mencken wanted to defend "Americanisms" against a steady stream of English critics, who usually isolated Americanisms as borderline barbarous perversions of the mother tongue. Mencken assaulted the prescriptive grammar of these critics and American "schoolmarms", arguing, like Samuel Johnson in the preface to his dictionary, that language evolves independently of textbooks.
The book discusses the beginnings of "American" variations from "English", the spread of these variations, American names and slang over the course of its 374 pages. According to Mencken, American English was more colorful, vivid, and creative than its British counterpart.
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