The following is a letter mentioning Stirner’s work among others, culled from Margaret Anderson’s literary journal The Little Review. This journal was the American sister publication to Dora Marsden’s Freewoman/New Freewoman/The Egoist, a force for “modernism” with an influence that outlived its publication. The reader’s letter in question was in response to an entire issue of the journal being dedicated to the French writer Remy De Gourmont.

From The Little Review
Vol. V. April 1919 No.11

The Reader Critic

Helen West Heller, Canton, Illinois: on The De Gourmont Number, The Little Review Vol. V. February-March No. 10-11

The De Gourmont number, great! I do not just admit the fineness of Ezra Pound, I am glad of him. What Roger Heller calls his poundigrams are a delight, but chiefly he is a Great Appreciator. It is a joy to find so exquisite a master of the exquisite differentiations of the English language. More, his thought has such urge of fine distinctions that only one speech irks him; he must be a Chaucer to an amalgam of the speech of two peoples.

All languages coalesced will be none too ample for the intense complexity of future thought. All languages and all arts are not enough with which to declare the sensings that wriggle within us. Ezra Pound and Margaret Anderson are administering the future to readers in this country. The English speaking denizens of the U.S. have been nursed by their silly eagle so long that it goes hard with them to have to learn something. But they probably will be compelled to swallow the cosmopolitan pill.

“Gourmont’s essays the best record of the civilized mind from 1885-1915.” From the excerpts here given de Gourmont would seem to be a condensed, transmuted record of Max Stirner’s ”Ego and his Own .” The War of the White Races was fought, is fighting, against three books: “Der Einzige Und Sein Eigenthum”, “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, “Das Kapital”; and the greatest of these is “Der Einzige Und Sein Eigenthum”.