George Sylvester Viereck

George Viereck was born in Germany, to a German father and American-born mother. His father Louis, born out of wedlock to German actress Edwina Viereck, was reputed to be a son of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Another relative of the Hohenzollern family assumed legal paternity of the boy. In the 1870s Louis Viereck joined the Marxist socialist movement. In 1896 Viereck emigrated to the United States. His American-born wife Laura and 12-year-old son George Sylvester followed in 1897.In 1904 while still in college, George Sylvester Viereck, with the help of literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn published his first collection of poems. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1906. The next year his collection Nineveh and Other Poems (1907) won Viereck national fame. A number were written in the style of the Uranian male love poetry of the time.