My Sister and I (Nietzsche) - History

History

My Sister and I was first published in 1951 by Boar's Head Books and distributed by Seven Sirens Press in New York City. Along with Nietzsche's authorship attribution, the translation from German was credited to noted early Nietzsche scholar Oscar Levy.

The book was tied quickly to controversial publisher Samuel Roth, the putative owner of Seven Sirens, who had spent jail time for the unlawful distribution of a version of James Joyce's Ulysses. In the book's introduction, an anonymous publisher claimed to have received the manuscript from a fellow inmate of Nietzsche's in Jena and to have hired Levy to translate the work only to have both German and English manuscripts confiscated, with only the latter surviving.

In a response letter, Levy's daughter vehemently denied her father's involvement with My Sister and I. Although Kaufmann claimed in a footnote in his biography Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist to have received a ghostwriting confession from minor author David George Plotkin in 1965, no other known record of this admission exists.

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