The Dawn of Day [Daybreak]

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1903. First US edition. Octavo. Publisher's original navy cloth, blind-stamped and gilt. Minor scuffing and spotting to boards; some bubbling to rear board cloth; faint toning to leaves, else near-fine.. Rare and uncommonly bright first U.S. edition of Friedrich Nietzsche's (1844-1900) classic polemical work The Dawn of Day (also translated as Daybreak), first published in the US by The Macmillan Company in 1903 (translation by Johanna Volz), after its initial publication in German in 1881 (Morgenröthe: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile). In The Dawn of Day Nietzsche presents an early attack on moral systems, commencing a sustained critique that would mature in his later works after he fully developed his concept of the "will to power." The work is also an early example of Nietzsche's skill in the aphoristic style, which would garner worldwide renown in the decades following his death in 1900. Drawing upon the ascendant materialism of his day, Nietzsche forcefully argues that moral and religious systems are ultimately the result of natural drives. Accordingly, human action is, at bottom, devoid of agency and is rather the product of a complex competition among diverse natural processes-a line of thought Nietzsche would further develop in his following work, The Gay Science (1882). The Dawn of Day contains the seeds of much of Nietzsche's later thought, which would ripen into an anti-foundational critique of the modern age that claims few, if any, equals into the twenty-first century. The translation and publication of Nietzsche's works in the US was a landmark event in the history of American thought; The Dawn of Day would influence many prominent US intellectuals, novelists, and philosophers, from H. L. Mencken to Jack London, many of whom revered the works of Nietzsche as launching a revolution in human thought. This bright first US edition has been well-preserved and is increasingly scarce in this condition.