Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
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- "[My educators] did not pretend to believe that everyone is educable, for they knew, on the contrary, that very few are educable, very few indeed. They saw this as a fact of nature, like the fact that few are six feet tall. [...] They accepted the fact that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience which nature has opened to some and closed to others."
In 1941 Nock published a two part essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled "The Jewish Problem in America", which some critics argue betrayed a virulent anti-Semitism. Nock equivocated: "Someone asked me years ago if it were true that I disliked Jews, and I replied that it was certainly true, not at all because they are Jews but because they are folks, and I don't like folks."[1] [2] A self-admitted recluse, such a response is but characteristic of Mr. Nock.
In 1943, two years before his death, Nock published his autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, the title of which expressed the degree of Nock's disillusionment and alienation from current social trends. After the publication of this autobiography, Nock became the sometime guest of oilman William F. Buckley, Sr., whose son, William F. Buckley, Jr., would later become a celebrated author.
