Daniel Tutt was born outside Portland, Oregon, and grew up there and elsewhere along the West Coast. His roots are working class, and he comes from a family that split up multiple times. He spent most of his life with a single mother and an estranged father, reconciling with the latter in his late twenties. From his early teens he worked a range of jobs—hod carrier, construction laborer, sales, and various odd jobs.
He attended college in a small town in Southern Oregon on a Pell Grant and student loans. Though philosophy is his primary discipline today, it was poetry that first opened the world of thought to him. His first major philosophical encounter, long before Marx, was with Nietzsche, whose work offered a reservoir of direction and inspiration—though his reading of Nietzsche has since changed considerably.
After college, outraged by the second Iraq War, Tutt drifted to Washington, DC, still working construction without professional prospects. By chance, he found a community of activists organizing religious groups to protest the war and promote interfaith relations. His entry into that world was made possible only through the patronage of a wealthy businessman—a dependence that sparked a sharp class consciousness. He came to see how those without familial wealth rarely escape their conditions except through such paternalistic support, a reality rarely spoken aloud.
This recognition turned his politics toward socialism and against progressive liberalism, a break completed during the Obama years. His forthcoming book is How to Read Like a Parasite.