In the first chapter of his insightful and beautifully written book, Mencken delves into the genesis of our greatest masculine prophet, ironically revealing that Nietzsche was a thoroughly emasculated youth, living under the care of doting women nearly his entire minority. His father’s untimely death from a horse fall left him as the prince of a little fawning court: mother, grandmother, two aunts and a sister. The sister would go on to take care of him his entire life. However, this was not the brand of man-hating feminist emasculation currently extinguishing masculine culture in the postmodern age, but rather the simple sissyfication of a spoiled boy, easily remedied by thrusting him into a masculine school world, where he would rebel against the entire submissive social order engendered by Western concepts of salvation and community.

The fact that Mencken openly pities Nietzsche his upbringing marks this as a study that is far more than the hagiography the whimpering collective mind of our day might be tempted to accuse Mencken of, extreme individualist that he was.

Below are a few quotes from this chapter:

“History does not record the name of the pedagogue who taught Nietzsche at the Naumburg gymnasium, but he must have been one who ill-deserved his oblivion.”

“…the long, gaunt Nietzsche of fourteen, with a yearning for the companionship of his fellows, and a voice beginning to grow comically harsh and deep, and a mind awhirl with unutterable things.”

[And after his dalliance with the boisterous, brawling fraternity of German students.]

“Nietzsche was not designed by nature for a hero of pot-houses and dueling sheds. The old fastidiousness asserted itself—that queer, unhealthy fastidiousness which, in his childhood, had set him apart from other boys, and was destined, all his life long, to make him shrink from too intimate contact with his fellow-men. The touch of the crowd disgusted him: he had an almost insane fear of demeaning himself…Nietzsche resigned from his student corps, burned his walking sticks, foreswore smoking and roistering…the days of his youth—of his carefree, merry gamboling—were over. Hereafter he was all solemnity and seriousness.”

Mencken, describing Nietzsche is a rare treat.