Randolph Bourne lived a short life that began as cruelly as it ended. At his birth in 1886, a traumatic delivery deformed his face; at the age of four a battle with tuberculosis affected his growth and left his back permanently hunched. Raised in Bloomfield, New Jersey, in a familial milieu characterised by suffocating respectability and downward fortunes, Bourne chafed at the forces and limitations that he felt restraining him. Wryly affirming his distance from the “normal person… of the middle-middle class,” he mused that he must have seemed “very queer out there” in the world. Armed with an ironist’s wit and acid pen, he would soon transform any premature gloominess about his life’s prospects into a startlingly creative vision of personal agency and collective filiation.
In 1911, in one of his earliest published essays, “The Handicapped – By One of Them”, Bourne laid claim to a “philosophy gained through personal disability and failure”. His physical experience, he noted, disposed him against the “cheap optimism of the ordinary professional man” and a “reactionary press and pulpit”, and towards a radicalism of defiance and experimentation.
Content from our partners
