Benjamin DeCasseres (1873-1945) was a writer in many forms, from editorial to poetry. Born in Philadelphia, PA, he dropped out of school and got a job as an office boy for the Editor-in-Chief of Philadelphia Press newspaper. At 16 he was promoted to proofreader and occasionally wrote editorials and reviews.
In 1899, at age 26, he moved to New York, a city he would fall deeply in love with. He got a job with the New York Sun as a proofreader. It was the next year his brother committed suicide by drowning himself. His first freelance article was published in 1902 and shortly thereafter began contributing to Elbert Hubbard’s various magazines (Ben often ghostwrote for Hubbard).
In 1906 he moved to Mexico to work for the English language edition of El Diario, but that only lasted a year before he moved back to New York and worked and lived there for the rest of his life.
He passed away in 1945.
Sub-pages:
The editor-in-cheif of UoE has run BenjaminDeCasseres.com since 2012.
Select Bibliography:
The Shadow-Eater (1915), Author.
Chameleon, Being A Book Of My Selves (1922), Author.
Forty Immortals (1925), Author.
James Gibbons Huneker (1925), Author.
Mirrors of New York (1925), Author.
The Shadow-Eater (1927), Author.
Anathema! Litanies of Negation (1928), Author.
The Superman In America (1929), Author.
Mencken and Shaw (1930), Author.
The Love Letters Of A Living Poet (1931), Author.
Spinoza, Liberator of God and Man (1932), Author.
When Huck Finn Went Highbrow (1934), Author.
The Muse Of Lies (1936), Author.
The Works of Benjamin DeCasseres (1939), Author.
FINIS (1945)
Representative Quote:
We have had in the last two thousand years Christian-baiters, Jew-baiters, free-speech baiters, free-thought baiters, and now in this country we are afflicted with the Pan-baiters.
They chase the great god from the eating places, from literature, from the “movies,” from the stage, from the painted canvas, from the great poem, from the hearts of the human.
Squat on their wooden thrones in sanctified sublimity, they crack their whip at the head of the happy god wherever he shows himself. Pan-baiting is the veritable business of our lawmakers and sectarian pundits. If they ever discover that sunlight intoxicates they will attempt to gouge the eyes out of the God of Day himself.-Benjamin DeCasseres,"The Pan-Baiters,"
from The Judge, 04-03-1920