The Search for “Chicago’s Great Soul” When Chicago was the intellectual and literary heart of America — and incredibly it once was — its nerve center was a rambling old barn in back of 876 1/2 North Dearborn Parkway, or, more specifically, at 18 Tooker Place. You walked down an alley and found, between two […]
The Ferrer School, established in 1911, became an important focus of cultural and social ferment in the years preceding the First World War. In New York City this was a period of extraordinary intellectual brilliance, in which many of the seminal ideas of the twentieth-century politics and art were being developed. Visitors to the Center […]
Aside from where I stand at any given moment, the centrum mundi of egoism in North America is the Dill Pickle Club of Chicago Illinois. Here are excerpts from the Chicago Tribune on the rising and falling fortunes of the building where Sirfessor Malfew Seklew and Ragnar Redbeard once held court. Jack Jones was the […]
The Optimist’s Ego I do not feel me travelling these rails, Elbowing the herd; For have I not been chosen to be I? Some great wise power pruned so well Through the bloom of teeming life That I am pleased with this I that I am. It picked me a keen gray firey glance To […]
“SURFESSOR OF EGOISM” [sic] is a delightful and informative and previously uncollected work about (and possibly by) Malfew Seklew. This article appeared in the Manchester Guardian (City Edition) Number 27,469 (September 25 1934) on page 20. Do the initials “M. S.” found at the end of the article indicate that Man Without a Soul was […]
John Nichols Beffel (1887 – 1973) was a journalist with sympathies to outsiders and anarchists. Among his many credits are pieces in the American Mercury, the Chicago Daily News, the Detroit Free Press, New Trends, the New York World, and the New York Herald Tribune among others. And, apparently, Cartoons Magazine for December 1911 (Volume […]
Advertisement from The Little Review Volume IV Number 4 (August 1917). “Lingual Psychology / The Science of Signs” by Dora Marsden appeared in serial form in The Egoist but has yet to be published as a book. – Trevor Blake
The thought that one’s specific interests are only shared by those who share all of one’s interests leads without exception to disappointment. We find our friends where we find them, and sometimes we don’t get to decide who their friends are or would be. We know that Dora Marsden never had any children, but why […]
Under the heading “Cassandra and the War,” the Evening Public Ledger (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) for January 6 1915 quotes Dora Marsden from The Egoist Volume I Number 19 (October 1 1914) speaking about World War I. At the start of this War to End All Wars, the Women’s Political Suffrage Union had stopped publishing their newspaper […]
The Fra was a magazine edited by Elbert Hubbard and published by the Roycrofters fine press. From Volume 6 Number 4, January 1911 (pages 103 – 106) comes a bombastic toast to Max Stirner by an unaccredited but unmistakable Benjamin DeCasseres. Ben later collected this piece, along with other biographical sketches, to comprise the book […]
