George Viereck was born in Germany, to a German father and American-born mother. His father Louis, born out of wedlock to German actress Edwina Viereck, was reputed to be a son of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Another relative of the Hohenzollern family assumed legal paternity of the boy. In the 1870s Louis Viereck joined the Marxist socialist movement. In 1896 Viereck emigrated to the United States. His American-born wife Laura and 12-year-old son George Sylvester followed in 1897.
In 1904 while still in college, George Sylvester Viereck, with the help of literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn published his first collection of poems. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1906. The next year his collection Nineveh and Other Poems (1907) won Viereck national fame. A number were written in the style of the Uranian male love poetry of the time.
In the 1920s, Viereck became close friends with Nikola Tesla. According to Tesla, Viereck was the greatest contemporary American poet. Tesla occasionally attended dinner parties held by Viereck and his wife. He dedicated his poem "Fragments of Olympian Gossip" to Viereck, a work in which Tesla ridiculed the scientific establishment of the day.
Between 1907 and 1912, Viereck turned into a Germanophile. In 1908 he published the best-selling Confessions of a Barbarian. He lectured at the University of Berlin on American poetry in 1911. He founded two publications, The International and The Fatherland, which argued the German cause during World War I. Viereck became a well-known Nazi apologist. He conducted an interview with Adolf Hitler in 1923 which offered hints of what was to come. In 1941, he was indicted in the U.S. for a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act when he set up his publishing house, Flanders Hall. He was convicted in 1942 for this failure to register with the U. S. Department of State as a Nazi agent. He was imprisoned from 1942 to 1947.
Viereck's memoir of life in prison, Men into Beasts, was published as a paperback original by Fawcett Publications in 1952. The book is a general memoir of discomfort, loss of dignity, and brutality in prison life. The front matter and backcover text focuses on the situational homosexuality and male rape described in the book (witnessed, not experienced, by Viereck). The book, while a memoir, is thus the first original title of 1950s gay pulp fiction, an emerging genre in that decade.
Viereck also published one of the first known gay vampire novels The House of the Vampire (1907). Not only is this one of the first known gay vampire stories, but it is also one of the first psychic vampire stories—where a vampire feeds off more than just blood.
George Sylvester is the father of Peter Viereck, a historian, political writer and poet. A 2005 The New Yorker article discusses how the younger Viereck both rejected and was shaped by the ideologies of his father.
