Post date: Jun 10, 2016 6:22:8 AM
Super‐hero, 1907
“This is the secret of the soul. Not until the hero has left it, is it approached in dream by—super‐hero.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), translated by A. R. Orage (d. 1934), Nietzsche in Outline & Aphorism, 1907. (Google Books) (HathiTrust) (3rd ed., Internet Archive)
The original, in Also sprach Zarathustra, 1884: “Dies nämlich ist das Geheimnis der Seele : erst, wenn sie der Held verlassen hat, naht ihr, im Traume,—der Über‐Held.” (Alexander Tille [d. 1912] translated Über‐Held in 1896 instead as “beyond‐hero,” Internet Archive.)
“Peter [Davenant] is, in fact, a sort of super‐hero, a trans‐leading‐man, a Cyclops of unselfishness, a Dreadnought of duty.”
—Willard Huntington Wright, “New Books Reviewed,” Los Angeles Times, 21 July 1912, quoted by anonymous, review of The Street Called Straight, by Basil King, Current Literature, vol. 53, no. 3, Sept. 1912, 339.
“Again, romance requires that all the men except the foreigners shall be heroes, that the foreigners shall be kept from a cowardly stampede by British pistols, and that the captain shall be a super‐hero ….”
—E. B. French, “The Titanic and the Literary Commentator,” The Bookman: A Magazine of Literature and Life, vol. 35, no. 6, Aug. 1912, 604.
Bill Mullins found an older source in The Atlanta Constitution, 5 Dec. 1909.