He began his career as an amateur printer, printing a broadsheet called The Owl while he was still at school writing satires on his schoolmates and teachers and "mournful valedictory odes".

He went through a youthful period, through which he thought all young poets with an imaginative cast of mind must inevitably pass, namely a combination of what he termed "idealistic fanaticism and Byronic romanticism".

[12] However, he soon departed from his religiosity and became aware of the heated discussions about the "missing link" in the writings of John Augustine Zahm, the priest and professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana).

[13] Probably the greatest influence on his thinking, in the sense of a clearer scientific Weltanschauung, was a chance encounter with a work of the German zoologist, biologist and philosopher, and popularizer of Darwin's evolutionary theory, Ernst Haeckel.

"[27][28] After his mysterious disappearance in 1913 in Mexico and his presumed death, and despite their estrangement, Scheffauer's devotion to his former master was such that he was responsible for publishing and editing translations of collections of Bierce's short stories in Germany.

After about a month in England and Scotland where he cycled or 'wheeled' much, and clearly came to loathe English food, he went to Germany in October 1904 and was mesmerized by Berlin – which he spoke of as "the modern Babylon" and "the Chicago of Europe".

[33] As the European correspondent for the San Francisco magazine Town Talk in which he regularly sent back accounts of his travels and poems, his tour of the "old world" included Paris, Monte Carlo,[34] Nice, Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Nuremberg,[35] Switzerland, Palermo, Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples,[36] Capri (where he met the romance philologist Alfons Kissner and the German painter and social reformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach), Barcelona, Zaragoza, Madrid, Toledo, Corboda, Seville, and Cadiz.

He joined the New Bohemian Club at The Prince's Head in the Strand, and drank what he thought was rather tepid English ale with literary figures such as Stephen Phillips, G. K. Chesterton and the poet and parliamentarian Hilaire Belloc.

As part of the University Settlement he lived in a house in the neighbourhood of lower east side, where he was clearly inspired to write his very successful play The New Shylock (1912), a study of Jewish-American life that addresses assimilation and acculturation.

A month before he was married it was reported in The Bookman in May 1912 that Scheffauer “has just finished a sort of epic novel of London, which will probably make its appearance this autumn”[51] In 1913 his play The New Shylock was performed at Danzig in Germany.

[53] A minor legal battle ensued between Scheffauer (who had the full backing of The Society of Authors) and the Jewish theatrical producer Philip Michael Faraday who attempted to censor some of the text.

[55] It was also produced in America at the Comedy Theatre, New York, in October 1915 in which the celebrated English actor Louis Calvert appeared playing the leading role of Simon Ehrlich.

"[59] Scheffauer printed here a number of his poems including "The Prayer of Beggarman Death (A Rime Macabre)" and "Not After Alma-Tadema", as well as his English translation of Gabriele D'Annunzio's homage to Nietzsche "Per la Morte di un Distruttore".

"[62] In one of his rare science fiction short stories, "The Rider Through Relativity" (1921) the European battlefields of Flanders and the Champagne in World War I are seen through a reversed chronology narrative.

His play had predicted the war and had seen through the hidden mechanisms that had encouraged its unfolding, depicting the sleepwalkers listening to the artificially produced voice of Mars, it is one of his most important but neglected works.

The character of the 'Mountebank' is clearly presented as a Mephistophelean figure, whispering affectionately into the ear of 'The Minister of War' and gleefully drinking every drop of blood in his beaker and toasting "To Liberty".

Dorl[65]) and The Fatherland (edited by George Sylvester Viereck who Scheffauer had known in New York literary salons since late 1909[66]) Increasingly concerned about the anti-German riots in England[67] and his "furrin" looking name, as well as having already received a visit from a Scotland Yard detective to his house,[68] he left London with his wife for Berlin via Amsterdam in March 1915.

[74]His friend, the writer and publisher Ferdinand Hansen congratulated him: “...a few days ago I received word from Mr. Scheffauer that he had been indicted on a charge of “treason” for certain articles he had written!

He tore the sophistries of certain English intellectuals– such as H. G. Wells, Gilbert K. Chesterton and John Galsworthy to shreds and exposed the hypocrisies and falsehoods of the Entente politicians with merciless irony...”[75] Scheffauer never returned to the United States or to England where he had much earlier been placed on a blacklist.

The notorious English populist editor and publisher and independent MP Noel Pemberton-Billing, renowned for his anti-German homophobia and anti-Semitism,[76] as early as November 1916 on the floor of the House of Commons had brought attention to Scheffauer’s journalism in The Continental Times and “to the articles containing abuse of all things British”.

Scheffauer was aware in July 1924 that Mann was close to finishing his "... study of a sick man in the environment of an Alpine sanatorium" and Mann wanted to entrust him with the translation of this novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), but failed, due to the opposition of his American publisher Alfred A. Knopf who was clearly influenced by the literary judgement and financial incentive of the London publisher Martin Secker to share translation costs if Scheffauer was not chosen.

The choice of American literature very much reflecting his ideas he gave in a key lecture at the University of Berlin in 1921 and contained in his chapter on 'Art and Literature' in his first work on America Das Land Gottes (God's Own Land) (1923), thus, the work of his friend Sinclair Lewis Die Hauptstrasse (Main Street) and Babbitt, appeared in the series, of which he had previously written: "These books reveal the worm gnawing at the heart of American life, the inner doubt and unhappiness, the unhappiness which results from the hollowness within and the shallowness of life without- and which seeks to distract itself by a ceaseless external activity.

"[85] Novels by Joseph Hergesheimer such as Java Head; and Tampico (also with a foreword by Scheffauer), Floyd Dell, "George Challis", the pseudonym of Max Brand, Lesley Storm and Mary Borden, as well as many westerns by Zane Grey.

[86] He thought it was quite unique, and from a social point of view something remarkable, he wanted his novel "to be thrown into the wide masses in a series of classical works of world literature in a popular edition" but his publisher Fischer, rejected the idea.

[88] Herman and Ethel Scheffauer both contributed regularly to The Bookman: An Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Life providing fascinating details about the German literary and publishing world.

He had already published the story that he gave as its main title "The Champagne Ship" back in January 1912 in New York in one of Frank Munsey's so-called "pulp magazines", The Cavalier and the Scrap Book.

Scheffauer played an important role in describing some of the contemporary art-movements in Germany for a wider English and American audience and his unique position was his personal acquaintance with these same figures.

Scheffauer cut his own throat and hurled himself from the window of his third storey flat; a search of his home quickly discovered the body of his secretary, apparently murdered by a single stab wound to the breast.

[98] He wrote to his wife shortly before he killed himself, who was staying with their daughter at their villa at Dießen am Ammersee, Bavaria, that he was in great "mental torment", and that each autumnal day it felt as if he was "... suffering the death of ten thousand mortal agonies".

Thomas Mann also attended and in his speech praised his ability as a translator of his works and attempted to explain his unhappiness at the end of his life, of which he admitted he had not the slightest idea, he thought it was due to the nature of his "undomiciled internationality" (der unbeheimateten Internationalität).