History of a literary radical, and other essays

RANDOLPH BOURNE Drawn by Arthur G. Dove from the Death Mask by James Earle Fraser
BY RANDOLPH BOURNE
HISTORY OF A LITERARY RADICAL AND OTHER ESSAYS
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION By VAN WYCK BROOKS
“ To write in favor of that which the great interests of the world are against is what I conceive to be the duty and the privilege of the intellectual. ”
Padraic Colum
NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH MCMXX INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY B. W. HUEBSCH, Inc. PRINTED IN U. S. A.
Most of the papers included in this volume have already appeared in one or another of the following magazines: The Atlantic Monthly , The Dial , The New Republic , The Seven Arts , The Yale Review , The Columbia University Quarterly , and are reprinted here with the kind permission of the editors.
Bitter-sweet, and a northwest wind To sing his requiem, Who was Our Age, And who becomes An imperishable symbol of our ongoing, For in himself He rose above his body and came among us Prophetic of the race, The great hater Of the dark human deformity Which is our dying world, The great lover Of the spirit of youth Which is our future’s seed....
James Oppenheim.
Randolph Bourne was born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, May 30, 1886. He died in New York, December 22, 1918. Between these two dates was packed one of the fullest, richest, and most significant lives of the younger generation. Its outward events can be summarized in a few words. Bourne went to the public schools in his native town, and then for some time earned his living as an assistant to a manufacturer of automatic piano music. In 1909 he entered Columbia, graduating in 1913 as holder of the Gilder Fellowship, which enabled him to spend a year of study and investigation in Europe. In 1911 he had begun contributing to The Atlantic Monthly , and his first book, “Youth and Life,” a volume of essays, appeared in 1913. He was a member of the contributing staff of The New Republic during its first three years; later he was a contributing editor of The Seven Arts and The Dial . He had published, in addition to his first collection of essays and a large number of miscellaneous articles and book reviews, two other books, “Education and Living” and “The Gary Schools.” At the time of his death he was engaged on a novel and a study of the political future.