Egoists

James Huneker's Egoists: A Book of Supermen is a vivid gallery of modern rebels, skeptics, mystics, and visionaries. Through penetrating literary portraits and critical essays, he traces the rise of the individual conscience against convention, morality, and mass culture, moving from Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, and Barrès to Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello. These are not dry critical studies but animated encounters with passionate, contradictory minds whose work helped shape modern sensibility. Huneker follows Huysmans from sharp social observation in Croquis Parisiens to the bleak inwardness of A Vau l'Eau, where Jean Folantin endures poverty, appetite, and disgust in a life made nearly unbearable by ordinary discomforts. He presents Ibsen as a dramatist of moral force whose plays remain vital for their intellectual energy and fearless challenge to convention. Rich in realism, sensuality, and spiritual unrest, the book celebrates genius as dangerous freedom. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.