Having told an American reader that Also Sprach Zarathustra “is the profoundest work in the German tongue, also the most perfect in its language,” Friedrich Nietzsche could not be accused of false humility. “But for others to feel” his philosophical and literary power, he added, “will require whole generations to catch up with the inner experiences from which that work could arise” (quoted at 19). Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's superb account of Nietzsche's impact in the United States shows that he overestimated the duration needed to grasp the importance of his post-religious anti-foundationalism. His obituary notices for a deity as well as his rejection of the prospect of uncovering universal truth met little resistance among all sorts of thinkers and writers. Far ahead of schedule, in America as well as in Europe, his iconoclasm would make Nietzsche an icon.

Of course, it helps to be “difficult,” to write poetically and ambiguously, and in a foreign language better known for its profundity than its charm, so that the precise meaning of terms like the Übermensch and the Wille zur Macht can be heatedly debated. Such advantages enable a thinker's influence to be protean. Ratner-Rosenhagen's task would nevertheless seem to be dicey. Her monograph comes late (which is fitting, given Nietzsche's sensitivity to the burden of belatedness). Books have already appeared on his impact in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, England, even Russia. Direct cultural reverberations may have been less conspicuous in the United States than elsewhere. To be sure, H. L. Mencken, Paul Elmer More and Crane Brinton did write books about Nietzsche. But there are no American equivalents to, say, Shaw's Man and Superman or Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra; and Heidegger, Jaspers, Lukács and Jung all grappled extensively with Nietzsche, who famously deemed himself a “good European.” But could a stateside admirer of so antiliberal, so anti-Christian a philosopher also be a good American? Such stances would seem uncongenial. Perhaps none of Nietzsche's American epigoni appears to have accepted one of his strangest ideas, which Mickey Sachs (Woody Allen) notes in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). “Nietzsche … with his theory of Eternal Recurrence” is dismissed as follows: “Great. That means I, uh, I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.”

Though the research apparatus brandished at the back of American Nietzsche is formidable, and though its prose and design are elegant, the most remarkable feature of this book is how much the author has discovered. Even if many of Nietzsche's fans and critics are, inevitably, minor figures (and an entire chapter is devoted to ordinary Americans blown away by his genius), the general claim that Ratner-Rosenhagen advances is incontestable: Nietzsche has been inescapable. From Royce to Rorty, from Bourne to Harold Bloom, from Kahlil Gibran to Eugene O'Neill, to reckon with Nietzsche not merely was a stimulus to thought, but might send shivers down the spine. (She does miss the invocation of Dionysian ecstatic violence that bewitched the young Mark Rothko.) To explore the implications of Nietzsche's ideas was, for many intellectuals and artists, not just a job but – to echo the US Navy's recruiting poster – an adventure. For example, the Protestant clergy initially tried to do damage control; Nietzsche's father had, after all, been a Lutheran minister. Such confrontations only made Nietzsche's prediction that “my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous – a crisis without equal on earth” (quoted at 70) more likely to be validated.

Even that cataclysm could evidently be accommodated, however. Though he was rough trade, Nietzsche could be installed in the academy. Ratner-Rosenhagen's chapter on Professor Walter Kaufmann deserves to be singled out for carefully exploring how one scholar and translator could dominate for well over a generation the appreciation of a thinker suspended between perspicacity and madness. While suggesting that Kaufmann's case for taming Nietzsche was overstated, she locates the cultural need for an antichrist, to be sure, but also for a rationalist with a coherent vision, and for a more liberal (and less sinister) figure than his own right-wing sister presented. One sly corrective to Kaufmann's version is offered in Ratner-Rosenhagen's gripping opening chapter on Nietzsche's own take on Emerson, who becomes more of an immoralist, pushing beyond the good and evil of conventional Christianity, than the sage of Concord actually was.

Yet American Nietzsche rarely corrects the interpretations of Nietzsche's own readers, and proposes no authentic standard of what he believed. Was he merely a template for their own yearnings? This book is thus a work more of description than of diagnosis. Such an approach is also true of Steven E. Aschheim's The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (1992). But because the American responses were politically inconsequential, the lower stakes expose more glaringly a method that is bound to stir wonder that so many different readings could be tenable. Nor does Ratner-Rosenhagen tend to linger over them. She notes his effect upon Will Durant's doctoral dissertation (1917), for instance. But even though a chapter of his best seller, The Story of Philosophy (1926), is devoted to Nietzsche (who gets as much space as Herbert Spencer), Durant's later work is ignored. So what is to be made of this brief encounter between a dead philosopher and an author whose achievements lay ahead? Nietzsche's radicalism did nick the young Walter Lippmann. But Ratner-Rosenhagen does not revise the consensus that the primary influences upon A Preface to Politics (1913) and Drift and Mastery (1914) were Freud, Bergson, James and Graham Wallas. With The Good Society (1937), to say nothing of The Public Philosophy (1955), Nietzsche's influence upon Lippmann had evaporated. Understandably the reasons do not interest Ratner-Rosenhagen. But one consequence of the scope of American Nietzsche is that the intellectual development of even Nietzsche's most enthralled readers is left unconsidered.