Dictionary of Literary Influences
.pdfBrooke, Rupert
Marlowe, John Marston, and John Webster. Rejecting Christianity and embracing socialism, he represented an upper-class version of the rebellion against conventional beliefs associated with D. H. Lawrence. His personal beauty and talent for networking made him the leader of a group of Cambridge students and friends who went on camping trips, bathed in the nude, and were nicknamed “Neo-Pagans” by their half-envious seniors of the Bloomsbury Group. His first book of poems (1911) showed great promise but shocked many reviewers by its realism. His King’s College fellowship thesis in the new discipline of English (1912) took a sharply revisionary approach to Shakespeare and his contemporaries; his views on literary tradition partially anticipate those later propounded by T. S. Eliot. He helped his friend (Sir) Edward Marsh to compile the anthology of contemporary writers published in 1912 as Georgian Poetry; this volume and its four successors defined a movement away from Victorian modes to a more direct style. In 1914 Brooke wrote sonnets on the outbreak of war, one of which, “The Soldier,” was enthusiastically adopted as the expression of English heroism. Brooke’s death from blood-poisoning on the way to Gallipoli on April 23, 1915, welded the image of the youthful poet to the poem so firmly that for most of the twentieth century he was regarded as the poster-boy for a naive patriotism that perished in the useless slaughter of the Somme.
Since 1980 masses of letters long withheld have been published or made accessible to scholars, and Brooke’s literary innovations can now be understood as closely linked to emotional struggles of his personal life. When he was in his teens, the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne influenced not only the style of his own poems but also introduced him to the issues he would concern himself with in later years, the Elizabethan dramatists and sexual identity. For the son of a Rugby schoolmaster, the elegant aestheticism of Walter Pater and fin de siècle writers of the 1890s provided an ideal means to express rebellion. Oscar Wilde was influential at this stage, and while his recent conviction for homosexual activities was clearly relevant to Brooke’s adolescent homoerotic leanings, his writings also paved the way for Brooke’s conversion to socialism and reading of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Sydney and Beatrice Webb. Brooke read widely in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, though in later years he admired August Strindberg more; he was one of the first English admirers of the German playwright Frank Wedekind.
Archives
King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge, England: letters and literary papers. Department of Manuscripts and Literary Archives, Cambridge University Library: letters
and literary papers.
Printed Sources
Brooke, Rupert. John Webster and the Elizabethan Dramatists (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1916). Brooke’s fellowship thesis, written 1911–12, published as a memorial.
Delany, Paul. The Neo-Pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth (New York: Free Press, 1987). Contextualizes Brooke’s conflicted intellectual and emotional positions.
Jones, Nigel. Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth (London: Richard Cohen, 1999). Comprehensive biography, based on archival material, crucial elements of which were not available before.
Lehmann, John. The Strange Destiny of Rupert Brook (New York: Holt, 1980). First showed the significance of Brooke’s breakdown in 1912 to understanding his career.
John D. Baird
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Bryan, William Jennings
BRYAN, WILLIAM JENNINGS (1860–1925)
William Jennings Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois. He attended Whipple Academy and graduated from Illinois College in Jacksonville in 1881. Studying law at Union Law School in Chicago, he passed the bar in 1883. Bryan moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1887, establishing a law partnership with a Union classmate. In 1890 he was elected to Congress where he forcefully argued for both tariff and monetary reforms. After serving two terms, Bryan’s strong advocacy of the free coinage of silver cost him the favor of President Cleveland and his seat. He continued his crusade by becoming editor of the Omaha World Herald. Prosilver delegates controlling the 1896 Democratic convention made Bryan the party’s candidate after he delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech. Losing the 1896 election, Bryan became a longstanding critic of the policies of the Republican majority. Though he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency on two more occasions, Bryan was named secretary of state by President Woodrow Wilson. Known for instigating numerous “treaties of reconciliation” with other countries, Bryan resigned in 1915, believing Wilson’s responses to the sinking of the Lusitania would lead to America’s involvement in the Great War. In the last years of his life, Bryan focused on moral issues, including prohibition. In 1925 he went to Dayton, Tennessee, to defend a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution in public schools. Though Bryan initially won the case remembered as the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” he was humiliated by his opponent, Clarence Darrow, who put Bryan on the stand as an expert on the Bible and attacked his apparent hypocrisy and pomposity. Dying shortly after the trial, Bryan’s last campaign served to obscure his many years of dedicated service to issues of reform.
Bryan was influenced from his earliest days by the Bible, especially its moral teachings as found in the Ten Commandments and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Though Bryan is usually associated with fundamentalism, he read the works of social gospel thinkers such as Washington Gladden. He corresponded with Charles Sheldon, the author of In His Steps, and also sent a letter to Richard T. Ely thanking him for sending a copy of his Political Economy. He sympathetically read, though did not always agree with, more socialist-leaning social gospel figures such as Walter Rauschenbusch, George Herron, and William D. P. Bliss, as well as single-tax advocate Henry George. Lists of books in his personal library, found in his Library of Congress papers, include a wide variety of reform-themed titles: Henry D. Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth, Thomas More’s Utopia, Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward and Equality, Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution, J. P. Putnam’s The Kingdom of Heaven Is at Hand, Josiah Strong’s The Twentieth Century City and Our Country, Jacob Riis’s The Children of the Poor and How the Other Half Lives, Jane Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics, and the collected works of Lev Tolstoy. To his dying day, Bryan’s favorite poem was one he learned from his parents: William Cullen Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl.”
Archives
Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: correspondence, notes, miscellaneous writings (Boxes 23 and 51 contain lists of books from his library).
Printed Sources
Ashby, LeRoy. William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy (Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1987).
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Cherny, Robert W. A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1985).
Smith, Willard H. “Bryan and the Social Gospel.” In William Jennings Bryan: A Profile, Paul Glad (ed.), (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968).
Williams, Charles Morrow. The Commoner: William Jennings Bryan (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1970).
Paul Allan Hillmer
BUBER, MARTIN (1878–1965)
Martin Buber was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1878 and grew up in Lvov, Galicia (present-day Ukraine), at the home of Solomon Buber, his grandfather and a scholar of Talmudic literature, responsible for critical editions of the Midrash. Buber studied art history, literature, and philosophy at the University of Vienna from 1897 to 1898 and at the University of Zurich in the summer of 1899, where he met the woman he would marry, Paula Winkler. He found his path through a form of Jewish mysticism known as Hasidism through his wife’s encouragement, writing three books on Hasidism and changing scholarly opinion on the subject. He received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1904 with a dissertation on German mysticism. Buber began a monthly magazine, Der Jude, in 1916. In 1922 Buber published his most important book, Ich und du (I and Thou), which contained his philosophy of dialogue, and he was made professor of comparative religion at the University of Frankfurt from 1925 to 1933. After Jews were barred from German educational institutions, Buber moved to Palestine in 1938, becoming a professor at the Hebrew University. Buber was a strong advocate of an Arab-Israeli state and lectured widely throughout the world. He died in Jerusalem in 1965.
Such mystics as Jakob Boehme and Meister Eckhart influenced Martin Buber. The book I and Thou established his reputation as a religious existentialist. Buber argues that human existence is dynamically relational, a dialogue occurring either in an objectifying mode (I–It) or a value-conferring mode of personal mutuality and openness (I–Thou). In this work we see the influence of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Søren Kierkegaard. Buber spoke of the Jewish–Christian relationship as a dialogue, arguing that both religions were authentic paths to God. Buber, along with Franz Rosenzweig, inaugurated a major shift in the focus of the Jewish–Christian dialogue in the 1950s. Buber was also greatly influenced by Gustav Landauer, a socialist, who saw a communal settlement in a new age of art, beauty, and religious dedication. Buber wrote widely on social and ethical problems and was influenced by German social theorists such as Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Ferdinand Toennies.
Archives
Martin Buber Archive, The Jewish National & University Library, Jerusalem, Israel.
Printed Sources
Anderson, R., and K. N. Cissna. Martin Buber–Carl Rogers Dialogue: A New Transcript with Commentary (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1997).
Avnon, Dan. Martin Buber: The Hidden Dialogue (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998).
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Buber, Martin, and Judith Buber-Agassi (eds.). Martin Buber on Psycholog y and Psychotherapy: Essays, Letters and Dialogue (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999).
Buber, Martin, and Gilya Gerda Schmidt (eds.). The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999).
Cohn, Margot, and Rafael Buber. Martin Buber: A Bibliography of His Writings, 1897–1978
( Jerusalem and New York: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1980). A first-rate bibliography of Buber’s writings.
Friedman, M. S. Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Best introduction in English to Buber’s thought.
Glatzer, N. N., and H. Bloom. On the Bible: Eighteen Studies by Martin Buber (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
Haim, G., and J. Bloch. Martin Buber: A Centenary Volume (New York: Ktav, for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Neger, 1984).
Kirsch, Hans-Christian. Martin Buber: Biographie eines deutschen Juden (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2001).
Mendes-Flohr, P. “Buber, Martin.” In R. J. Zwi Werblowsky and G. Wigoder (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 141–42.
Silberstein, L. J. “Martin Buber.” In Mircea Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion 2, (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 316–18.
Shapira, Avraham, and J. Green. Hope for Our Time: Key Trends in the Thought of Martin Buber
(SUNY Series in Judaica, Hermeneutics, Mysticism and Religion), (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
Richard Penaskovic
BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH (1888–1938)
Nikolai Bukharin was born in Moscow, Russia. His father, Ivan Gavrilovich, played an important role in the young Bukharin’s education, especially with respect to natural history, world literature, and painting. Like many revolutionaries, Bukharin’s parents were devout Russian Orthodox and politically conservative. After the completion of primary school in 1900, Bukharin entered one of the best classical humanities gymnasiums and earned excellent grades. By the 1905 Revolution, Bukharin was a member of an illegal radical student group. A year later he joined the Bolshevik political party. In the fall of 1907, Bukharin passed his entrance examinations to Moscow University while working as a Bolshevik organizer and propagandist. He studied economics and jurisprudence there until his administrative exile in 1910. Between 1912 and 1914, Bukharin published a number of articles and books such as The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (1914) that defended orthodox Marxism against the revisionist theorists of the AustroMarxists. After the October Revolution, Bukharin’s theoretical writings were centered around the problem of building a new socialist society in Russia. He became the editor of the party’s official newspaper, Pravda, in 1918. By 1921 Bukharin published two more major theoretical works that earned him a reputation as the foremost Bolshevik social theorist: Historical Materialism (1921) and Imperialism and World Economy (1917). Receptive to Marxist criticism and highly influenced by Karl Marx’s (1818–83) critics, Bukharin did not regard Marxism as a closed system of thought. After 1925, when his economic program had become official party doctrine, Bukharin became vulnerable to opposition attacks. The Stalinist majority formally denounced Bukharin in 1928. Josef Stalin attacked his ideas, political
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supporters, and friends. Bukharin spent the last eight years of his life relegated to a minor political post. He was sentenced, tried, and executed as an “enemy of the people” in 1938.
Bukharin’s early, unsystematic reading of world literature under the direction of his father constituted an important part of his education. By the time he joined the Bolshevik party at the age of 17, Bukharin had familiarized himself with French, German, and English. An early influence on the young Bukharin was the nihilism of the Russian social thinker Dmitri Pisarev. When he began to attend Moscow University, his interests shifted to economics, philosophy, sociology, and contemporary, non-Marxist theories. Like many young intellectuals of his day, Bukharin read and admired the work of Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Marxist philosopher Alexander Bogdanov had a deep influence on his most important book, Historical Materialism (1921). After 1917 Bukharin turned to an analysis of Marx’s critics such as Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and Max Weber. Particularly the writings of the Austro-Marxism school, represented by Otto Bauer, and Rudolf Hilferding’s
Finance Capital: The Newest Phase in the Development of Capitalism, left a lasting impression on Bukharin. Unlike most Bolshevik leaders, such as Vladmir Lenin, Bukharin was deeply influenced by twentieth-century social thought. The “new sociology” of Emile Durkheim, Benedetto Croce, Weber, and Michels had a profound impact on the intellectual development of Bukharin.
Archives
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) [Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History], Moscow, Russia: Bukharin’s personal papers, correspondence.
Printed Sources
Bergmann, T., G. Schaefer, and M. Selden (eds.). Bukharin in Retrospect (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1994).
Cohen, Steven F. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Gluckstein, Donny. The Tragedy of Bukharin (Boulder: Pluto Press, 1994).
Kozlov, N. N. and E. D. Weitz (eds.). Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin: A Centenary Appraisal
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).
Larina, A. This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow (New York: Norton and Co., 1993).
Eugene M. Avrutin
BULTMANN, RUDOLF KARL (1884–1976)
Rudolf Bultmann was born in Wiefelstede, Germany, the son of Helene Stern and Arthur Bultmann, a Lutheran minister. Both his grandfathers were also clergymen. After attending the elementary school in Rastede from 1892 to 1895 and the humanistic gymnasium in Oldenburg from 1895 to 1903, he matriculated in theology at the University of Tübingen. He spent three semesters there, then two at the University of Berlin, taught at the Oldenburg Gymnasium in 1906 and 1907, and received his Lic.Theol. from the University of Marburg in 1910 with a thesis on St. Paul, directed by Johannes Weiss and Wilhelm Heitmüller. After completing his habilitation thesis on Theodore of Mopsuestia, directed by Adolf Jülicher, in 1912,
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he taught at Marburg until 1916, the University of Breslau until 1920, the University of Geissen for one year, then, as Heitmüller’s successor, again at Marburg from 1921 until he retired in 1951.
Besides the Bible, Martin Luther, and Søren Kierkegaard, most of Bultmann’s strongest influences came from his teachers and his early colleagues. Professors such as Karl Müller, Adolf Schlatter, Theodor Haering, and Heinrich Maier at Tübingen; Hermann Gunkel, Adolf von Harnack, Julius Kaftan, and Gustav Hoennicke at Berlin; and Wilhelm Herrmann, Karl Budde, Carl Mirbt, Martin Rade, Johannes Bauer, and Paul Natorp at Marburg all contributed positively to his development as a theologian and New Testament scholar. Although Bultmann never took a course from Hermann Cohen, the neo-Kantian spirit pervaded his Marburg student experience. As a Marburg student he also became friends with Rade, editor of Die Christliche Welt (The Christian World). Teaching at Marburg in the 1920s, Bultmann found himself not always agreeing with but always stimulated by his fellow faculty, including Rudolf Otto, who succeeded Herrmann; Hans von Soden, who succeeded Jülicher; Gustav Hölscher, who succeeded Budde; Walter Baumgartner, Martin Heidegger, Paul Friedländer, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gerhard Krüger, Karl Löwith, Heinrich Schlier, and Günther Bornkamm. Equally fruitful were his exchanges with thinkers from outside Marburg, such as Karl Barth, Friedrich Gogarten, Karl Jaspers, Erich Frank, and Julius Ebbinghaus.
Archives
The most significant collection of Bultmann material is at the University of Tübingen, but much else is in other repositories in Europe and America, including four linear feet at Syracuse University. Some is in private hands. Bultmann’s literary executor, his daughter Antje Bultmann Lemke, explained some of her decisions regarding the fate of his extensive legacy of papers and correspondence in “Der unveröffentlichte Nachlass von Rudolf Bultmann,” in Rudolf Bultmanns Werk und Wirkung, edited by Bernd Jaspert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 194–207. She and Eberhard Jüngel, Rudolf Smend, and Eduard Lohse formed a committee in the 1980s to choose materials for occasional publication. Jaspert has brought out two volumes: Bultmann’s correspondence with Karl Barth and Bultmann’s notes from his seminars on the New Testament from 1921 to 1951. Additional details are available in Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976): Nachlassverzeichnis, edited by Harry Wassmann, Jakob Matthias Osthof, and Anna-Elisabeth Bruckhaus (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001).
Printed Sources
Ashcraft, Morris. Rudolf Bultmann (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1991).
Baasland, Ernst. Theologie und Methode: Eine historiographische Analyse der Frühschriften Rudolf Bultmanns (Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1992).
Bultmann, Rudolf. “Autobiographical Reflections.” in Existence and Faith, Schubert M. Ogden (trans.), (New York: Meridian, 1960), 283–86.
Evang, Martin. Rudolf Bultmann in seiner Frühzeit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988). Fergusson, David. Bultmann (London: Chapman, 1992).
Johnson, Roger A. The Origins of Demythologizing: Philosophy and Historiography in the Theolog y of Rudolf Bultmann (Leiden: Brill, 1974).
Malet, André. The Thought of Rudolf Bultmann, Richard Strachan (trans.), (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971).
Smart, James D. The Divided Mind of Modern Theolog y: Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, 1908–1933 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967).
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Young, Norman James. History and Existential Theolog y: The Role of History in the Thought of Rudolf Bultmann (London: Epworth, 1969).
Eric v.d. Luft
BUNUEL, LUIS (1900–1983)
One of the most original film directors of the twentieth century, Luis Bunuel was born in Calanda, Spain, on February 22, 1900. Though he was Spanish, he worked mainly in Mexico (where he emigrated in 1934) but made his most famous movies in France. Oddly, Land without Bread, Viridiana, and Tristania are the only three films he directed in his native country. After his first film, Un chien andalou (An Andalousian Dog, 1928), a 20-minute surrealist essay co-scripted with his friend Salvador Dali, Bunuel became in 1929 an official member of the Mouvement surréaliste with many important writers (André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret) and painters (Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Max Ernst). The surrealist influence can be seen in such movies as L’Âge d’or (1930), El Angel Exterminator (Exterminating Angel, 1962), Le Fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty, 1974), and in his unforgettable last movie, Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977).
In his childhood, Bunuel had a very religious Catholic education, first at the Corazonistas, then at the Jesuit College del Salvador in Saragossa, Spain. Bunuel had an excellent knowledge of the Bible, but he lost his faith when he read Darwin’s The Origin of Species at 17. Between 1917 and 1925, Bunuel went to Madrid to pursue his studies in engineering. There he met Federico Garcia Lorca and Dali.
Bunuel became anticlericalist during the 1920s. The result was films about religion and priests in a very satiristic approach, such as L’Âge d’or (1930), Nazarin (1958), Simon du désert (1965), La Voie lactée (1968). Tiny anticlerical attacks are relevant in almost every Bunuel movie: in Robinson Crusoe (1952), the isolated Robinson uses a copy of the Bible as a hammer to build a fence around his camp. In Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), a bishop is looking for a job as a gardener.
In his autobiography, titled My Last Sight, Bunuel devotes an entire chapter to explaining his main literary influences. Oddly, the book he preferred was an old and precise dissertation about insects, in ten volumes, titled Souvenirs Entomologiques, written by a French “amateur” with no scientific degree, Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915). The director admits his debt toward French authors such as the Marquis de Sade, and this is clearly relevant in many of his films, such as L’Âge d’or (1930), El (1951; not to be confused with another film he made the next year, titled El Bruto), and Cet obscur objet du désir (1977). The best example of Sade’s strong influence can be seen in El, when a jealous husband wants to “sew” his wife while she is sleeping. Other artists he admired were composer Richard Wagner and director Fritz Lang. After Bunuel’s death, his friend and co-screenwriter JeanClaude Carrière explained that the three books Luis Bunuel admired most were novels (written in French) that he discovered during the 1920s before he left Spain:
Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid, by Octave Mirbeau), La femme et le pantin (by Pierre Louÿs) and Là-bas (by Joris-Karl Huysmans). The director was lucky enough to adapt the two first books (the second became Cet obscur objet du désir); nonetheless, a complete script of his never-made movie adapted from Là-bas was written in French and published in 1993.
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Archives
Luis Bunuel Archives, Filmoteca Española, Institut de la Cinematografia y de las artes audiovisuales, Madrid.
Printed Sources
Bouhours, Jean-Michel, and Nathalie Schoeller (eds.). Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne: “L’Âge d’or. Correspondance Luis Bunuel et Charles de Noailles. Lettres et documents 1929–1976,” special issue (Paris, Éditions du Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1993).
Bunuel, Luis. Là-bas, Jean-Claude Carrière (preface) [1976] (Paris, Éditions Écriture, 1993).
———.My Last Sigh (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
———.An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Bunuel, Garrett White (trans.), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
Bunuel, Luis, and Salvador Dali. L’Âge d’or, Paul Hammond (ed.), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Buñuel, 100 Years: It’s Dangerous to Look Inside (Buñuel, 100 años: es peligroso asomarse al interior), (New York: Instituto Cervantes: Museum of Modern Art, 2001).
Yves Laberge
BURROUGHS, WILLIAM SEWARD II (1914–1997)
William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended John Burroughs School, St. Louis (1925–29), the Ranch School, Los Alamos, New Mexico (1929–31), and Harvard University (1932–36). He enrolled in medical school at the University of Vienna (1936), but left the same year, and in 1937 started graduate studies in psychology (Columbia University, New York) and archeology (Harvard), but dropped both. From 1939 to 1946 Burroughs lived in New York, where he met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, got involved in petty crime, started using heroin, and met Joan Vollmer, later his common-law wife. Burroughs moved to New Waverly, Texas, in 1947, where his son was born, then to Algiers, Louisiana (1948) and Mexico City, Mexico (1949). He studied Mayan and Mexican architecture at Mexico City College. In 1951 Burroughs killed his wife while attempting to shoot a glass off her head. Afterward he began writing in earnest, going from reportorial novels about his drug use and homosexuality ( Junky and Queer) to such experimental works as Naked Lunch and the Nova trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express). In Colombia in 1953, he experimented with hallucinogens (see The Yage Letters). Subsequently he lived in Tangier (1954–58), Paris (1958–60), and London (1966–73). A major figure in the Beat Generation, Burroughs’s novels and lifestyle were pivotal to the development of the post-1950s counterculture. He settled in New York in 1974, then moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981.
Burroughs’s early writings included collaborations with Kells Elvin (“Twilight’s Last Gleaming”) and Jack Kerouac (“And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks”). He constructed Naked Lunch from manuscript with help from Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Alan Ansen. Brion Gysin inspired Burroughs’s use of cutups and fold-ins in the Nova trilogy. A book Burroughs read at thirteen, Jack Black’s You Can’t Win, spurred his interest in crime and provided a pattern for his first published novel, Junky.
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At Harvard, John Livingston Lowes’s course on Samuel Taylor Coleridge stimulated Burroughs’s interest in connections between drugs and creativity. Burroughs heard Count Alfred Korzybski, author of Science and Sanity, lecture in 1939, drawing from his works ideas about language, either/or dichotomies, and thinking in pictures. In 1947 Burroughs became interested in Wilhelm Reich’s theories about connections between sexual repression, drug use, and cancer, as explored in Reich’s book The Cancer Biopathy. Many direct references to Reich appear in Naked Lunch, and links between social repression and neurosis recur in Burroughs’s novels. After his wife’s death, Burroughs found inspiration to write in Denton Welch’s writings. Burroughs’s frequent cutting of other authors’ works into his own, as well as his constant allusions, confound the concept of literary “influence” as such, but clear instances of direct influence appear in The Wild Boys, for which Poul Anderson’s science-fiction work The Twilight World provided a source, and “The Examination” scene of Naked Lunch, which reflects Joseph Conrad’s novel Under Western Eyes.
Archives
Arizona State University Library, Tempe. Draft manuscripts, dream notes, clippings, Burroughs’s magazine collection.
Butler Library, Columbia University, New York. Letters, manuscripts, galley proofs.
Printed Sources
Goodman, Michael. William S. Burroughs: An Annotated Bibliography of His Works and Criticism (New York: Garland, 1975).
Grunberg, Serge. “A la recherche d’un corps”: Langage et silence dans l’œuvre de William S. Burroughs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979).
Johnston, Allan. “The Burroughs Biopathy: William S. Burroughs’ Junky and Naked Lunch and Reichian Theory,” Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1984), 107–20.
Lydenberg, Robin. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (New York: Henry Holt, 1988).
Mottram, Eric. William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (London: Marion Boyars, 1977).
Allan Johnston
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C
CAMUS, ALBERT (1913–1960)
Albert Camus, the son of Lucien Camus and Hélèn Sintès, was born and spent his boyhood in the French-controlled Algeria. After his father’s death in World War I, Albert’s mother, who was semideaf and illiterate, was forced to raise her son in extreme poverty—living in a squalid apartment near the Arab quarter of Algiers. Camus escaped his dismal conditions by immersing himself in academics and athletics at the local schools. He came to the attention of one of his teachers, Louis Germain, who tutored the intellectually gifted young man and enabled him to pass the entrance exams to the lycée in 1923. He attended the University of Algiers, majoring in philosophy, before illness forced him to cease being a full-time student.
During the earlyto mid-1930s, he worked in a series of menial jobs and had a short-lived marriage. In 1934, he became involved in socialist political activism and remained an ardent leftist for the remainder of his life. From the mid-1930s, Camus wrote for and edited several socialist newspapers.
He participated in the French Resistance during World War II and managed to write his classic novel, L’étranger, which was published in 1941. During the same year, he met Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existentialist ideas and literary endeavors became a major influence on Camus. From the 1940s through the 1950s, Camus wrote novels and plays which focused primarily on existentialist themes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and continued to write until his life was cut short by an automobile accident in Paris in 1960. He left unfinished a novel, The First Man, which was published posthumously in the mid-1990s.
Camus had several major literary influences. He was fascinated by the works of René Descartes who wrote about ideas of revolt and rebellion and the philosopher’s concept of existence preceding essence. Though he admired much in Nietzsche, Camus was not fond of the German philosopher, nor did he find the ideas of Karl Marx particularly inspiring—a point which would eventually damage his relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus noted that the works of André Gide were par-
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