George Sylvester Viereck ( born December 31, 1884 in Munich,
died March 18, 1962) was a German-American poet, writer, and
propagandist. Viereck's father, Louis, born out of wedlock to
German actress Edwina Viereck, was reputed to be a son of Kaiser
Wilhelm I, although another relative of the Hohenzollern family
assumed legal paternity. Louis in the 1870s joined the Marxist
socialist movement, and in 1896 emigrated to the United States,
followed by his American born wife Laura and 12-year-old George
Sylvester in 1897. George Sylvester Viereck in 1904, with the help
of literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn published his first collection
of poems, followed in 1907 by Nineveh and Other Poems which won
Viereck national fame. A number of these are written in the style
of the Uranian male love poetry of the time. He graduated from the
College of the City of New York in 1906. In the 1920s, Nikola Tesla
became a close friend of Viereck. According to Tesla, Viereck was
the greatest contemporary American poet. Tesla occasionally
attended dinner parties held by Viereck and his wife, and wrote a
poem which he dedicated to his friend Viereck. It was called
"Fragments of Olympian Gossip" in which Tesla ridiculed the
scientific establishment of the day. Viereck turned into a
Germanophile between 1907 and 1912. In 1908 be published the
best-selling Confessions of a Barbarian. He lectured at the
University of Berlin on American poetry in 1911. Notably, he
conducted an interview with Adolf Hitler in 1923 which offered
hints of what was to come. He founded two publications, The
International and The Fatherland, which argued the German cause
during World War I. Viereck became a well-known Nazi apologist, was
indicted for a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act in
1941, when he set up his publishing house, Flanders Hall, and was
imprisoned from 1942 to 1947. Viereck's memoir of life in prison,
Men into Beasts, was published as a paperback original by Fawcett
Publications' Gold Medal Book line of paperback originals in 1952.
The book is a general memoir of discomfort, loss of dignity, and
brutality in prison life, but the front matter and backcover text
focuses on the situational homosexuality and male rape described in
the book (witnessed, not experienced, by Viereck). The book, while
a memoir, is thus the first original title.
