Dictionary of Literary Influences

Ceaus¸escu, Nicolae

Archives

Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln; Houghton Library, Harvard; Love Library, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Willa Cather Historical Center, Red Cloud; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale.

Printed Sources

Gerber, Philip. Willa Cather (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989).

McDonald, Joyce. The Stuff of Our Forebears: Willa Cather’s Southern Heritage (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998).

Rosowski, Susan J. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

Ryder, Mary Ruth. Willa Cather and Classical Myth: The Search for a New Parnassus (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990).

Urgo, Joseph R. Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).

Annette Trefzer

CEAUS¸ ESCU, NICOLAE (1918–1989)

Nicolae Ceaus¸escu was born into a family of peasants in Scornices˛ti in southern Romania and received a summary primary education in the village school before moving to Bucharest in December 1928 to assist in his brother-in-law’s cobbler’s shop. The exact circumstances of his first contacts with communist and labor activists are not known, but he was only 15 when, on October 23, 1933, he was arrested for distributing pamphlets. The rest of his early years were spent between underground militant activities and jail until his release in August 1944 when Soviet troops arrived in Romania. The years before his rise to power did not, then, offer any opportunity for a developed education, a situation which was changed only slightly by his attendance at a few courses at the Moscow Military Academy from 1950 to 1951. Ceaus˛escu’s accumulation of power may be summarized as follows: elected member of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, 1945–48 and 1952–89; member of the politburo 1955; first secretary of the Communist Party from 1965; president of the republic in 1974. He was overthrown by a popular revolt on December 22, 1989, and shot on Christmas Day following a summary trial.

There is little reliable documentation on Ceaus˛escu’s education or on the instruction he received in Communist circles inside or outside of prison. His school certificates have been shown to be unreliable (Kunze 2000, 21), and the claims made in Communist propaganda (e.g., Ardeleanu; Matichescu) that Ceaus˛escu had access in jail not only to works by Marx and Engels but also to progressive Romanian writers (Nicolae Ba˘ lcescu, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, A. D. Xenopol) are unverifiable. There is no record of Ceaus˛escu’s personal library: his interior designer recently revealed that Ceaus˛escu had no interest in arranging books in his many homes by any other criterion than the shiny appearance of their spines (Petcu & Roguski 2001, 97). Contemporaries and colleagues who have given interviews or published memoirs since 1989 agree both that Ceaus˛escu was poorly educated and

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that he showed little interest in acquiring further instruction through books (Betea 1995, 66–71; Betea & Bârla˘ deanu 1998, 45–46; Câmpeanu 2002, 21–25, 69–71). It appears, however, that he had some taste for nineteenth-century Romantic nationalist poets such as Dimitrie Bolintineanu and George Cos˛buc, whose sentimental patriotism and use of easy-to-remember folk rhythms may have appealed to Ceaus˛escu’s temperament.

Archives

Documents (of questionable authenticity, as noted above) relating to Ceaus˛escu’s youth and early career were formerly held at the memorial house in his home village of Scornices˛ti, Romania; and at the Doftana prison museum, Romania: both these were ransacked after his fall from power in 1989 and remain closed. Abundant documentation relative to Ceaus˛escu’s political career can be found in the Archives of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, kept at the National Archives in Bucharest.

Printed Sources

Ardeleanu, Ion. “Doftana: temnit˛a˘ s˛i universitate,” Magazin istoric, II, nr.7–8 (1968), 101–3. Betea, Lavinia (interviewer). Maurer ˛is lumea de ieri. Ma˘rturii despre stalinizarea României

(Arad, Romania: Fundat˛ia culturala˘ “Ioan Slavici,” 1995).

Betea, Lavinia (interviewer), and Alexandru Bârla˘deanu. Alexandru Bârla˘deanu despre Dej, Ceaus˛escu ˛is Iliescu (Bucures˛ti: Evenimentul românesc, 1998).

Câmpeanu, Pavel. Ceaus˛escu, anii numa˘ra˘torii inverse (Ias˛i: Polirom, 2002).

Fisher, Mary Ellen. Nicolae Ceaus˛escu: A Study in Political Leadership (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1989).

Gabbanyi, Anneli Ute. The Ceaus˛escu Cult (Bucures˛t: FCR, 2000).

Kunze, Thomas. Nicolae Ceaus˛escu. Eine Biographi (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2000).

Matichescu, Olimpiu. Doftana, simbol al eroismului revolut˛ionar (Bucures˛ti: Editura politica˘, 1979).

Petcu, Mirela, and Camil Roguski. Ceaus˛escu: adeva˘ruri din umbra˘ (Bucures˛ti: Evenimentul Românesc, 2001).

Alexander Drace-Francis

CÉSAIRE, AIMÉ (1913– )

Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique. He attended Lycée Victor Schoelcher (1924–31) before traveling to Paris, France, where he enrolled in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand (1932–35) as well as the École Normale Supérieure (1935–39). While in Paris, he met the Senegalese writer, Léopold Sédar Senghor, with whom he collaborated in editing the short-lived review, L’Etudiant noir (1934–36) and helped found the “négritude” movement—defined by Senghor as “the totality of the cultural values of the black world.” Returning to Martinique in 1939, Césaire embarked on a literary career. He and a group of associates founded a review, Tropiques, which criticized the social order and the pro-Nazi Vichy government. The review’s political content led to his political involvement. For 14 years, he was a member of the Communist party (breaking with them in 1956 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary), and helped win Martinique the status of overseas départment of France. His literary output consisted of a number of volumes of poetry (e.g., Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, 1939], Les Armes miraculeuses [Miraculous Weapons, 1944], and Soleil cou coupé

[Beheaded Sun, 1948]). In addition, he wrote several dramas along with political

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writings and other documents produced by his long tenure as mayor of Fort-de- France. As one of the founders of the négritude movement, his influence has been extensive in both Caribbean and Francophone literature.

Césaire’s principle literary influences stem from his association with Senghor in Paris in the 1930s. There he read Paul Claudel’s Tête d’Or, as well as works by Stéphan Mallarmé, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Arthur Rimbaud. The latter proved to be extremely influential and led Césaire toward the surrealism that permeates his works. Other influences during the 1930s were the writings produced by members of the Harlem Renaissance in the United States—particularly work by Langston Hughes. The ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud influenced his work as well. The existentialist philosopher René Le Senne and Louis Lavelle with his “doctrine of participation” motivated Césaire to incorporate some of their theoretical components into his literary endeavors throughout the course of his career.

Archives

Special Collections, La Bibliothèque Schoelcher: Rue de la Liberté, Fort-de-France, Martinique. Manuscripts and papers.

La Bibliothèque Marxiste de Paris: 21 rue Barrault, Paris, France. Contains records (correspondence, etc.) of Césaire’s involvement with the Communist Party.

Printed Sources

Davis, Gregson. Aimé Césaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Hale, Thomas A. Les Écrits d’Aimé Césaire: Bibliographie commentée (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1978). Exhaustive listing of Aimé Césaire’s works (books, articles, correspondence, governmental documents, etc.), ca. 1935 to ca. 1975.

Joseph E. Becker

CHAGALL, MARC (1887–1985)

Marc Chagall was born on July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Russia. In 1907 he went to St. Petersburg to study at the Academy of Arts and, dissatisfied, went to the private school of Leon Bakst. He traveled to Paris and remained in the capital from 1910 to 1914 where he painted extensively. After the war, he moved back to Russia and created the Academy des Beaux Arts. Returning to Paris in 1923, he organized retrospective exhibits and created many works. He resided in New York in 1941, and after 1944 settled in a small village of France, St. Paul de Vance, where he enjoyed painting, which he interspersed with extensive travel around the world.

Chagall had a long and prolific career. Raised in the traditional values and readings of the Torah, his family valued the Hassidistic tradition of Jews, who worship the omnipresence of God and a constant living communion between God and man. The artist remained faithful to this Jewish ritual and popular tradition in his work. His excellent knowledge of the Bible and the episode of the Garden of Eden would be a recurrent theme in his paintings. His illustrations for the Bible (1931–39 and 1962–63), in their intensity and visionary force, their pathos and human understanding, bring to mind Rembrandt, whom he greatly admired.

The artistic climate of Paris (1910–14) offered a stimulating contrast to the artist’s cultural background. The aesthetics of the Ecole de Paris and his intense artistic activity with Chaim Soutine, Constantin Brancusi, and Amedeo Modigliani brought him to reconsider his work with deeper shades and elongated forms.

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Chamberlain, Arthur Neville

His renditions of animals, circus people, flowers, and trees were constructed with a deep interplay of colors that was inspired by the Russian avant-garde of Larionov, Sonia Delaunay, and Natalia Gontcharova, which, as expounded in their Realistic Manifesto of 1920, aimed at concentrating on the absolute value of art and its independence from the society, be it capitalist or communist. His meeting with the French publisher of La revue Blanche (1902), Apollinaire, the French avant-garde poet and theoretician of The Cubist Painters-Aesthetic Meditations (1913), was crucial: he was able to develop new themes based on movements, curvilinear distortions, and fragmentation with cubist friends Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee. He also experimented with colors in the Orphist movement (Robert Delaunay), and worked with futurist artists Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carra. The main characteristic of futurism was its intention to become involved in all aspects of modern life, and its first manifesto (signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti), published in 1909, led him to develop more diversified themes in his paintings. The theory of surrealism by André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme (1924–30), inspired him to explore the association of dreams, but his paintings, imbued with psychological depth and the mysticism of Eastern European Jewish culture, remained original. The racial persecution carried out under Adolf Hitler’s rule and his reading of Mein Kampf (1923) prompted Chagall to deal with more dramatic characters. His Crucifixion series (1955–70) reflect his anguish over the plight of his own people in Europe during the Second World War and to some extent would inspire works of Salvador Dali. His constant preoccupation with poetry, opera, and novels led him to illustrate La Fontaine’s Fables (1929–31), the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1914), and passionate and exuberant lithographs of the Arabian Nights (1946).

Traditionally recognized as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century, he brought poetry back into painting through subject matter. Harmony and joy radiate through a very distinctive set of colors and a world of recurrent characters such as fiddlers, circus acrobats, flowers, and robins.

Archives

Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris; Centre Pompidou; Le Louvre; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Printed Sources

Chagall, Marc, and Charles Sorlier. Les céramiques et sculptures de Marc Chagall (Monte Carlo: A. Sauret, 1973).

Chatelain, Jean. Le message biblique. Marc Chagall (Cologne: Fernand Mourlot, 1972). Christ, Dorothea. Marc Chagall (Berne: Hallwag, 1973).

Fineberg, Jonathan David. Art since 1940; Strategies of Being (London: Calmann & King, Ltd., 2000).

Marceau, Jo (ed.). Art. A World History (New York: DK Publishing, 1998). Shwob, René. Chagall et l’âme juive (Paris: Correa, 1939).

Martine Sauret

CHAMBERLAIN, ARTHUR NEVILLE (1869–1940)

Neville Chamberlain was born in Birmingham, England, in 1869 at the height of England’s reputation as the shopkeeper to the world. Born into a politically con-

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Chamberlain, Arthur Neville

scious family, Chamberlain grew up following in the footsteps of his father, Joseph—the radical Liberal leader of the late nineteenth century who broke with Gladstone over the Irish Question before bringing his rump Liberal Unionist Party into coalition with the Conservatives at the turn of the century—and his older halfbrother, Austen, a rising political star.

Like Austen, Neville Chamberlain attended Rugby, but did not enjoy the experience, having little interest in sports. Following Rugby, he attended Mason College, the forerunner of the University of Birmingham, an institution that provided a more “practical” education than the traditional universities. There he studied metallurgy and science. Unlike most of his contemporaries in politics, therefore, Chamberlain did not receive the traditional Oxbridge education still stressing classical knowledge; he would later complain that he “neither knew nor cared anything” about art and music—although he did enjoy traveling across Europe with his sisters to view both (Feiling 1946, 214). After two years of study, Chamberlain joined a firm of chartered accountants and then spent several years on the island of Andros in the Bahamas overseeing a failed family business venture growing sisal.

From an early age, Chamberlain had been encouraged to pursue a variety of intellectual pursuits. A love of gardening began as a young child and broadened into a general interest in natural history while at Rugby and Mason College, which included reading Darwin and other works on the subject. While in the Bahamas, he returned to these interests to fill the hours and combat the isolation, reading particularly works on the native flowers and birds. He later recalled that Edward Grey’s The Charm of Birds, with its descriptions of bird songs, was a favorite (Dilks 1984, 27). While in the Caribbean, he read broadly, from political biography— Carlyle’s biography of Cromwell, among others—to history, J. R. Green’s History of England, to fiction, including Middlemarch and contemporary German novelists (Feiling 1946, 23–27). His letters home to his sisters, especially Beatrice, provided a running commentary on his readings.

Although the Bahamian venture failed, he gained valuable experience, which he then used to launch a successful business career at home in Birmingham. During World War I, the successful businessman was appointed the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, an office held by his father many years before. His first foray into national politics was as director general of the National Service during the First World War, and he was first elected to Parliament at the age of 49, serving as the Conservative MP for the Ladywood division of Birmingham. In 1922, Chamberlain joined the Conservative front bench, beginning his national career as postmaster general. In 1937, he would attain the height, becoming prime minister following the retirement of Stanley Baldwin.

Chamberlain’s political ideas were primarily inherited from his father, Joseph, from whom he inherited a reforming ideology and a belief in protectionist legislation and imperial ties, but his mental outlook was also shaped by his business experience and scientific interests. As one biographer has written, he became prime minister as a result “of a proved record of administrative ability, forensic skill and knowledge of the party” (Dilks 1984, 326). These contributed to a tendency to see everything through a practical lens, guided by principles such as economic solvency and a technocrat’s reliance on figures and expert opinion.

Often this served Chamberlain well. In the 1920s, Chamberlain came to be associated with a number of initiatives aimed at reforming the Poor Law, which also laid

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Chaplin, Charles Spencer

the foundation for the British welfare state that would emerge following the Second World War. As a technocrat, Chamberlain was the perfect minister. Although wary of Adolf Hitler before their first meeting, Chamberlain changed his mind and believed he could deal with the Nazi leader. After the 1938 resignation of Anthony Eden, Chamberlain assumed the role of de facto foreign minister and conducted the most important diplomatic negotiations himself. He was, however, a man ill-suited to the role by both temperament and inclination. He was strong-willed to the point of stubborn. As a result, it could be argued that he had a disastrous impact on the European situation prior to the outbreak of war in 1939. It can similarly be argued that, like all men of his age, he was profoundly impacted by the carnage and waste of the First World War. He saw as his mission the prevention of a new general war in Europe. It was a vision soon to founder in the seas of World War II.

Chamberlain’s biographer noted that he had “few indoor relaxations beyond music and reading” and habitually read each evening before retiring to bed. As in the Bahamas, his reading list was broad, and he possessed “wide but well-defined tastes.” In these, he cared little for poetry, except Shakespeare. Fiction from Eliot to Twain, detective stories, the classics of history (Gibbon, Macaulay, Trevelyan, Acton), contemporary biography, and books on a variety of more specific topics all occupied his time, and he maintained a running inventory of his library throughout his life (Dilks 1984, 388). Despite lacking the traditional Oxbridge education—per- haps because he had not had one—he developed a great faith in his own knowledge and ability.

Archives

Neville Chamberlain Papers, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England. Much material on Neville Chamberlain’s career is also to be found in the papers of his halfbrother, Austen, his half-sister, Beatrice, and his sisters, Ida, Hilda, and Ethel—especially his regular letters home to the sisters reporting on his activities. These collections are also held at the University of Birmingham.

The Public Record Office, Kew Gardens, London, contains the official records of his political career.

Printed Sources

Dilks, David. Neville Chamberlain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Dutton, David. Neville Chamberlain (London: Arnold, 2001).

Feiling, Keith. The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946).

Parker, R. A. C. Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

Ruggiero, John. Neville Chamberlain and British Rearmament: Pride, Prejudice and Politics,

(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999).

Rock, William. Neville Chamberlain (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969).

Phyllis Soybel

CHAPLIN, CHARLES SPENCER (1889–1977)

Charlie Chaplin was born in Walworth, England, on April 16, 1889, to parents who performed in music halls. His father died of alcoholism; his mother went insane a few years later. Chaplin began his career by accident, at five years old, at the Aldershot’s Cantine, replacing his mother who had a malaise. In 1908, young

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Chaplin, Charles Spencer

Chaplin played in many theaters for Fred Karno’s Speechless Comedians. He toured in Britain and France and went to the United States as an actor in 1910, when his troupe was on tour. He went back to England, but in 1912 returned to New York City with a one-way ticket. Two years later in Hollywood, he made his first short film for Keystone Film Company, inventing the unforgettable character of the tramp. Chaplin was one of the four cofounders of United Artists in 1919. The 1920s was his most important period, mixing comedy with social criticism in The Kid (1920) and The Gold Rush (1926). The next five feature films became his most famous: City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940),

Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952). Chaplin left the United States for the London premiere of Limelight in 1952 when his U.S. visa could not be renewed. He settled in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland, in 1953, where he lived until his death at 88. Chaplin was the first complete author in film history: scriptwriter, director, actor, producer, and music composer for his soundtracks.

In his autobiography, Chaplin recalled the first book he read, Oliver Twist, admitting he was fascinated with Dickens’s characters, especially the old man in The Old Curiosity Shop. He also remembered that he read a lot in 1912, on tour in the United States, when he discovered Robert Ingersoll’s Essays and Lectures. That book made Chaplin realize how cruel the Old Testament was. Chaplin says he bought at that time Schopenhauer’s famous World as Will and Representation, and often read parts of it over the next 40 years, though he never finished the book. Chaplin also appreciated Emerson’s essay on independence. He liked Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and William Hazlitt; he always disliked Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Chaplin wrote that he partly agreed with Max Eastman’s book titled A Sense of Humour. Director Luis Bunuel once said that he saw for the first time Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary Triumph des Willens (1935) with Chaplin, in a private screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bunuel recalled that he was horrified by what he saw on screen, but was surprised to observe Chaplin frequently laughing. Maybe he was already imagining scenes that would appear in The Great Dictator. It is interesting to notice that Chaplin never adapted a novel or a play for his feature films, preferring to write original subjects.

Archives

Chaplin Archives, Geneva, Switzerland. Manuscripts, hand-written orchestrated scores. The Cineteca di Bologna, Italy. Scripts, notes, drawings, photographs, production and pro-

motional materials.

Chaplin Archives, Museum of the Moving Image in London.

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C. FBI Files on Charlie Chaplin. For an unofficial guide to the files, see http://www.fadetoblack.com/foi/charliechaplin/, last accessed October 19, 2003.

Printed Sources

Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography (London: Bodley Head, 1964).

Lyons, Timothy James (ed.). Charles Chaplin: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979).

Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of Star Image (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Yves Laberge

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Chávez, Cèsar

CHÁVEZ, CÈSAR (1927–1993)

Cèsar Chávez was a Mexican American reformer who dedicated his life to improving the working conditions for farm laborers on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border. He was born in Yuma, Arizona, to Mexican immigrants, Librado and Juana, who spoke Spanish to young Cèsar at home, inculcated in him traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, and raised him as if he were Mexican. When the Chávez family grocery store went bankrupt during the Great Depression, they became migrant farm workers. Because the family crisscrossed the Southwest in pursuit of jobs harvesting crops, Chávez skipped from school to school. In eighth grade, when Cèsar’s father was injured in a car accident, he dropped out of school permanently to help support his family. Ultimately, his migrant lifestyle inspired Chávez’s lifelong dedication to reform agribusiness practices whose exploitation he and his family experienced.

Those reforms primarily came about through his creation of a labor union called the United Farm Workers (U.F.W.) in 1966. Among other goals, U.F.W. worked to raise wages for laborers, outlaw unsafe harvesting practices, and improve health policies. Chávez used grassroots activism to launch community-wide strikes, motivate consumers to boycott specific produce companies, and march on the government in protest of unfair labor practices. Perhaps the most famous of Chávez’s protests was the Delano grape strike and boycott of the late 1960s. By joining with striking Filipino workers, Chávez ultimately attracted the attention and earned the support of thousands of white, middle-class Americans who sided with David rather than Goliath. Ultimately, Chávez’s forces defeated the parent grape companies who conceded to the workers’ demands for increased pay.

Chávez’s lifelong commitment to community activism brought about reform. In 1986, the U.S. government passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to undocumented Mexican migrants working in the United States. In addition, the Mexican government passed an act to afford social security benefits to Mexicans working in the United States and affiliated with U.F.W. Today Chávez’s legacy is larger than such legislative changes might suggest. Rather than a union leader, he is viewed as a spiritual leader of the Chicano movement and celebrated along with fellow heroes of the 1960s, such as John F. Kennedy, Martin

Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

Chávez’s impressive career can be attributed, in part, to several literary influences that stem from Mohandas Gandhi and the Roman Catholic Church. Chávez first encountered Gandhi’s ideas while helping a local priest, Father Donald McDonnell, who provided Chávez with readings on papal encyclicals on labor, the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi, and readings by Gandhi (Griswold del Castillo and Garcia 1995, 23). Chávez was so struck by Gandhi’s values that he read Louis Fisher’s biography, The Life of Gandhi, on his own initiative. In Cèsar Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit, the author explains how Ghandi’s philosophies resonated with Chávez’s personal experience: “Ghandi spoke about the complete sacrifice of oneself for others, about the need for self-discipline and self-abnegation in order to achieve a higher good. These were values that Mexican farm workers could understand” (Griswold del Castillo and Garcia 1995, 23). The principle of nonviolence later would become a hallmark of Chávez’s leadership in protest movements against the agribusiness industry.

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Chomsky, (Avram) Noam

The Catholic Church was also a major influence in Chávez’s life. Traditionally, the Chávez family was strongly devoted to a rich spiritual life that transcended secular activities. Regardless of where the family resided, they regularly attended mass, honored the holy sacraments, learned church history, and loyally celebrated church feast days. There is ample evidence of the important role of the Church in Chávez’s life as a reformer. Under his guidance, for example, strikers would often transform Chávez’s station wagon into a shrine to Our Lady of Guadaloupe. He would also invite local priests to pray on behalf of a community strike or he’d encourage them to participate in boycotts. Finally, Chávez reshaped protest marches into spiritual pilgrimages. In 1966, he called for a march from Delano to Sacramento, California, to inform then-governor Pat Brown of farm labor abuses. The religious fervor that Chávez ignited on the march resembled that inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. on his journey from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Archives

A Guide to the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. Holdings include published and unpublished sources from the late 1960s and early 1970s, photographic essays, issues of El Malcriado (the union’s newspaper), and biographies written since the mid-1970s.

Printed Sources

Brown, Mary Elizabeth. “Cèsar Chávez.” In Shapers of the Great Debate on Immigration: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999).

Day, Mark. Forty Acres: Cèsar Chávez and the Farm Workers (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971). One of the most comprehensive sources by a union insider; the book is written from the perspective of Catholic social teaching and principles of nonviolence.

Dunne, John. Delano, Story of the California Grape Strike (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967). First book to thoroughly address the grape strike of 1965–67 along with the conflicts between the Filipino and Mexican members of the U.F.W.

Fodell, Beverly. Cèsar Chávez and the United Farm Workers: A Selective Bibliography (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1974). A bibliographic source citing journal and newspaper articles about Chávez; text may need to be supplemented by a follow-up bibliography titled

Selected Bibliography: United Farm Workers, 1973–1976.

Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Richard Garcia. Cèsar Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit (Oklahoma Press: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).

Levy, Jacques E. Cèsar Chávez: Autobiography of La Causa (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975). Mathhiessen, Peter. Sal Si Puedes: Cèsar Chávez and the New American Revolution (New York:

Random House, 1969). Narrative of Chávez’s early life and of the Delano, California, Grape Strike.

Taylor, Ronald. Chávez and the Farm Workers (Boston: Beacon, 1975).

Rosemary King

CHOMSKY, (AVRAM) NOAM (1928– )

Noam Chomsky, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the United States, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, William (Zev) Chomsky, principal of Philadelphia’s Jewish Mikveh Israel school and president of Gratz College, fled Russia in 1913 to avoid conscription into the Czarist army, gained a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, and became one of the world’s leading scholars of Hebrew language. His highly intellectual mother, Elsie Simonofsky, a Hebrew

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Chomsky, (Avram) Noam

teacher, was a political and social activist. From the ages of 2 to 12 Chomsky attended the Deweyite experimental Oak Lane Country Day School, run on noncompetitive lines designed to encourage individual development; he then moved to Mikveh Israel School, excelling academically though he thought it overly competitive. In 1945 Chomsky, aged 16, entered the University of Pennsylvania, studying Arabic, philosophy, languages, and logic. At this time Chomsky, like his parents a disciple of the unorthodox Zionist Asher Ginsburg, who opposed the creation of a distinctly Jewish state, was already deeply interested “in efforts at Arab–Jewish cooperation within a socialist framework” (Chomsky 1987, 7) and briefly considered emigration to Palestine. His most influential teacher at Pennsylvania was the pioneering structural and descriptive linguist and politically radical Zellig Sabbetai Harris, under whose direction—though he often differed from his mentor— Chomsky subsequently gained master’s and doctoral degrees. In 1955 Chomsky joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, where his numerous writings, including Syntactic Structures (1957) and

The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (written in 1955–56, though only published in 1975), revolutionized linguistic studies. By the late 1990s he had published over 70 books and 1,000 articles and was the most cited living academic author. Chomsky also became a prominent political activist, best known for his condemnation from radical perspectives of United States policies in Vietnam and other Third World countries as undemocratic and detrimental to those nations. He also criticized many aspects of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and other Arabs.

As a child Chomsky was a precocious and competitive student, at the age of seven reading through much of Compton’s Encyclopedia. An avid reader, at elementary school he devoured works by nineteenth-century realist novelists, including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Victor Hugo, Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Mark Twain, and Emile Zola. Heavily influenced by his father’s interests, Chomsky studied Hebrew language and literature, including the Bible and books by nineteenth-century Hebrew renaissance and turn-of-the-century Yiddish-Hebrew writers. At the age of 12 Chomsky read one of his father’s draft manuscripts, later stating: “My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud. I love the idea of parallel texts, with long, discursive footnotes and marginal commentary, texts commenting on texts” (Barsky 1997, 10). Once he started high school Chomsky made numerous trips to New York, haunting bookstores and, assisted by his uncle, a hunchbacked socialist newsvendor, meeting numerous radical intellectuals. Reading voraciously in both Marxist and non-Marxist left-wing works, including those of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, and many others, Chomsky quickly gravitated toward anarcho-syndi- calists, finding Rudolf Rocker’s works particularly persuasive. The writings of George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War, especially Homage to Catalonia, permanently influenced Chomsky, who found Spanish anarcho-syndicalists far preferable to orthodox Marxists. At his uncle’s urging the teenaged Chomsky also read Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic works and was “much impressed,” though “on rereading years later I was appalled, frankly” (Barsky 1997, 50). In the later 1940s he read devotedly the New York anarchist and pacifist magazine Politics, published by Dwight and Nancy Macdonald. Academically, in his early career Chomsky rather ignored the predominant structural linguistic school. His linguistic studies were heavily influenced by the philosophical works of Rudolf Carnap, Gottlob Frege,

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