[1] He was married to author Bio De Casseres, and corresponded with prominent literary figures of his time, including H. L. Mencken,[2] Edgar Lee Masters,[3] and Eugene O'Neill.

[5] At the age of sixteen, De Casseres started working as an assistant to Charles Emory Smith, editor of the Philadelphia Press, for $4 per week.

[6][7] At the Press, De Casseres rose from his position as an assistant to become a "copy boy," editorial paragrapher, dramatic critic, proofreader, and (briefly) city editor.

[8][9][10][11] During his ten years at the press, De Casseres had a few publications, including one of his first signed editorials, an article that appeared in Belford's Magazine praising Thomas Brackett Reed.

Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff called the volume "a welcome tribute to individualism and defiance" and the poems themselves "metaphysical meteors, searching, cataclysmic and rich in satire.

"[22] A review in The New York Times favorably compared De Casseres to Walt Whitman, claiming "if his alien, highly individual genius remains unrecognized, criticism will lie upon the public, not upon him.

"[24] By 1923, when the book was reissued by the American Library Service, a reviewer for Poetry wrote that De Casseres had lost "the simple sincerity of utterance which is the birthright of the true prophet.

His first signed editorial, published in 1890 when De Casseres was 17, praised the administrative changes Thomas Brackett Reed had recently made as Speaker of the House.

[32][33] In October 1909, a letter to the editor of The Sun in which De Casseres called socialism the "illusion of the twentieth century" sparked a series of responses in the same publication and others.

[38][39] As a Hearst columnist, De Casseres routinely railed against socialism, communism, and other forms of collectivism,[40] and he excoriated those who promoted such political structures, including H. G. Wells,[41] Upton Sinclair,[42] and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In one of the letters, De Casseres describes a dream in which "after thirty years together we were both cremated and our ashes mixed inextricably" and "cast into the depths of the sea" where eventually they are "returned to the ecstatic hermaphroditic union of a great biological-mystical fable.