George Sylvester Viereck
| George Sylvester Viereck | |
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Portrait of Viereck, by Underwood & Underwood, 1922
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| Born | George Sylvester Viereck December 31, 1884 Munich, Germany |
| Died | March 18, 1962 (aged 77) Holyoke, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Journalist, novelist, essayist |
| Genre | Poetry |
George Sylvester Viereck (December 31, 1884 – March 18, 1962) was a German-American poet, writer, and pro-Nazi propagandist.
George Viereck was born in the Kingdom of Bavaria, to a German father and American-born mother. His father Louis, born out of wedlock to German actress Edwina Viereck, was reputed to be a son of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Another relative of the Hohenzollern family assumed legal paternity of the boy. In the 1870s, Louis Viereck joined the Marxist socialist movement. George Viereck began writing poetry when he was eleven. His heroes were Jesus Christ, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Oscar Wilde. In 1896, Louis Viereck emigrated to the United States; his U.S.-born wife Laura and their twelve-year-old son George followed in 1897.
While still in college, in 1904, George Sylvester Viereck, with the help of literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn, published his first collection of poems. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1906. The next year his collection Nineveh and Other Poems (1907) won Viereck national fame. A number were written in the style of the Uranian male love poetry of the time. The Saturday Evening Post called Viereck "the most widely-discussed young literary man in the United States today".
Between 1907 and 1912, Viereck turned into a Germanophile. In 1908, he published the best-selling Confessions of a Barbarian. Viereck lectured at the University of Berlin on American poetry in 1911. For his support of Germany and pacifism, Viereck was expelled from several social clubs and fraternal organizations, and had a falling out with a close friend, poet Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff.
During World War I he edited a German-sponsored weekly magazine, The Fatherland with a claimed circulation of 80,000. In August 1918, a lynch mob stormed Viereck's house in Mount Vernon, forcing him to seek refuge in a New York City hotel. In 1919, shortly after the Great War, he was expelled from the Poetry Society of America.
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