Forced by his parents to study law, he knew that a legal career was not what he wanted; he was passionately interested in music and writing, hoping one day to be a concert pianist and a novelist.

At twenty-one, he abandoned his office job and Philadelphia ties and (with his pregnant girlfriend, then wife) left for Paris, telling his parents that he was departing only the night before the ship sailed.

He also began a lifelong immersion in European art and literature and was thrilled to catch sight on his wanderings through the city of Victor Hugo, Ivan Turgenev, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Émile Zola as well as Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

Huneker and his wife and child returned to Philadelphia the following year, but he was never happy again in his native city and longed for the wider stage of New York, where he hoped to try his luck as a journalist while he continued his study of music.

[4] There he scraped by, giving piano lessons and living a downtown bohemian life, while he studied with Franz Liszt's student Rafael Joseffy, who became his friend and mentor.

"[6] At other times, Huneker wrote with admirable brevity and acuity: Ernest Lawson's landscapes were created with "a palette of crushed jewels", and the Ash can painter George Luks was "the Charles Dickens of the East Side.

"[citation needed] At a time when conservative tastes dominated American cultural life, he stated his credo boldly in a New York Sun column in 1908: "Let us try to shift the focus when a new man comes into our ken.

He was a particular (sometimes obsessive) fan of the opera singer Mary Garden, renowned for her singing in Pelléas and Mélisande and Thais, whom he called "an orchidaceous Circe...the nearest approach to Duse on the lyric stage.

"[9] He expressed reservations that have not stood the test of time, believing that the music of Giacomo Puccini and Sergei Prokofiev would eventually fall out of favor, but many of his judgments have proved prescient.

The famous Armory Show of 1913, America's first large-scale introduction to modernism, presented him with formidable challenges; he did not find much to praise in Paul Cézanne or the Cubists, Futurists, or Dadaists.

[11] A reader of eclectic tastes, he also wrote in praise of Friedrich Nietzsche, Anatole France, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, Maxim Gorky, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, and Jules Laforgue.

He recommended Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw (intermittently), Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind to American audiences long before most theatergoers were ready to accept their works.

"[13] He took particular pleasure in describing and praising the talented actresses of the day (e.g., Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse, Alla Nazimova, Julia Marlowe, Minnie Fiske) when they took on challenging roles.

11 that "[small]-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid it",[16] Douglas Hofstadter, in his book I Am a Strange Loop, named the unit by which "soul size" is measured the huneker (lower case).