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Mother of Detective Fiction
The Life and Works of Anna Katharine Green
Patricia D. Maida
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989
When The Leavenworth Case, Anna Katharine Green’s first novel, was published in 1878, it quickly became a bestseller as well as a seminal work of detective fiction. Critics were to perceive Green’s work as the link to Edgar Allan Poe in the American line of classic detective fiction. But the development of serial detectives is perhaps her greatest achievement. (Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police, who makes his first appearance in 1878, precedes Sherlock Holmes by almost a decade.)
    In examining the life and works of Anna Katharine Green, one discovers a slice of American life: in the social events of New York City, in the plight of young working women, in the moral dilemmas of upright citizens pursuing the American dream.
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front cover of Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power
Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power
A Biography of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
Carol Diethe
University of Illinois Press, 2002
A penetrating study of the sister who betrayed and endangered her famous brother's legacy

In 1901, a year after her brother Friedrich's death, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche published The Will to Power, a hasty compilation of writings he had never intended for print. In Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power, Carol Diethe contends that Förster-Nietzsche's own will to power and her desire to place herself--not her brother--at the center of cultural life in Germany are centrally responsible for Nietzsche's reputation as a belligerent and proto-Fascist thinker.

Offering a new look at Nietzsche's sister from a feminist perspective, this spirited and erudite biography examines why Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche recklessly consorted with anti-Semites, from her own husband to Hitler himself, out of convenience and a desire for revenge against a brother whose love for her waned after she caused the collapse of his friendship with Lou Salomé. The book also examines their family dynamics, Nietzsche's dismissal of his sister's early writing career, and the effects of limited education on intelligent women. Diethe concludes by detailing Förster-Nietzsche's brief marriage and her subsequent colonial venture in Paraguay, maintaining that her sporadic anti-Semitism was, like most things in her life, an expedient tool for cultivating personal success and status.

A volume in the series International Nietzsche Studies, edited by Richard Schacht

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