Ebook: The Works Of Benjamin De Casseres 2

In 1936 Benjamin DeCasseres took it upon himself to try to publish as much of his own work as he could. He paid for the printing himself. In the following three years, between 1936 and 1938, he published 23 booklets. Those 23 were collected together in 1939 into this three volume set called The Works of Benjamin DeCasseres.

De Casseres described himself as an individualist anarchist. As a columnist, De Casseres routinely railed against socialism, communism, and other forms of collectivism, and he excoriated those who promoted such political structures. 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 [philosophical] camp stirs me as does Nietzsche or as does De Casseres."

De Casseres was also a staunch opponent of Prohibition. He used his position as a well-known editorialist to criticize, often satirically, prohibition policies. In particular, he wrote about the effect of Prohibition on New York City, especially its ineffectiveness of actually preventing drinking. At various times De Casseres defended free speech. 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.

In 1915, De Casseres published his first book, a collection of poetry titled The Shadow-Eater, to mixed reviews. 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."