Dictionary of Literary Influences

Churchill, Winston Leonard Spencer

Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Bertrand Russell, the British mathematician, philosopher, and peace activist, whose career became an inspiration and model for his own.

Archives

In private possession.

Printed Sources

Barsky, Robert F. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). Comprehensive biographical study.

Chomsky, Noam. The Chomsky Reader. James Peck (ed.), (New York: Pantheon, 1987). Includes Chomsky’s own account of his early intellectual development.

Haley, Michael C., and Ronald F. Lunsford. Noam Chomsky (New York: Twayne, 1994). Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York:

Basic Books, 1987).

Leiber, Justin. Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Overview (Boston: Twayne, 1975).

Otero, Carlos P. (ed.). Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 1994). Salkie, Raphael. The Chomsky Update: Linguistics and Politics (London: Unwin-Hyman, 1990).

Priscilla Roberts

CHURCHILL, WINSTON LEONARD SPENCER (1874–1965)

Born in 1874 to Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife, Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill was born into wealth and the upper echelons of British society. His grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough, represented the tradition of land and aristocracy that still permeated British society in the nineteenth century. Although Churchill never accepted a peerage, this worldview influenced him throughout his entire life.

Sent to Harrow for schooling, he had little interest in the classics—and did poorly in them—but developed both a love of history and “an aptitude for the use of the English language” that would serve him well in the future ( Jenkins 2001, 18). Overall he did well academically at Harrow, although he later fostered the notion that he had struggled (Rose 1994, 28). Instead of university, Churchill went on to the British military academy at Sandhurst and entered the army, being first stationed in India. It was during this time that Churchill’s interest in writing and history came to the fore. He seems to have discovered a value in learning and in reading that had not manifested during his years at school.

While serving in India, he became a voracious reader of history, philosophy, economics, and other subjects, reading Gibbon, Macaulay, Hallam, and Adam Smith. These historians remained a primary influence on his writing and historical outlook throughout his life (Plumb 1969, 140). He also began his career as a journalist, reporting on the campaigns to which he was assigned for London papers, then turning these articles into his first books on the North–West Frontier and Omdurman campaigns. At various points during his long political career, Churchill continued to serve as a freelance writer, primarily to supplement his income.

In later years, he published numerous well-received histories detailing the history of the English-speaking nations, as well as his personal histories of both World Wars. His six-volume The Second World War received the Nobel Prize for Litera-

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ture in 1953. He also wrote major biographies both of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the maverick Tory Democrat of the 1880s, and his forebear, the first duke of Marlborough, John Churchill. In his writings, his style “drew heavily on Macaulay—‘crisp and forcible’—and Gibbon—‘stately and impressive’” (Rose 1994, 55). In his historical works, he had a tendency to overlook the faults of his heroes, particularly his father, and to adopt a Whiggish interpretation of British history. In this he was influenced by his reading of the traditional histories of England by J. R. Green, G. M. Trevelyan, and others (Plumb 1969, 134–37).

Like his father, Churchill went into politics upon leaving the army, beginning as a conservative MP in 1900, moving to the Liberal Party in 1904, and returning to the Conservatives following the end of World War I. In his political career, Churchill would serve as the president of the Board of Trade, first lord of the Admiralty (twice), chancellor of the Exchequer, and would conclude his career with two turns as prime minister, first during World War II and again from 1953 to 1955. While his political career often suffered as many reverses as advances, his triumphant lead as prime minister from 1940 to 1945 firmly established his reputa- tion—as well as providing him the opportunity to apply both his knowledge of history and his writing ability in his public rhetoric.

Churchill died in 1965 and became only one of select few outside the monarchy to be given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey. It is hard to measure Churchill’s influence on the twentieth century, if only because he inspires the strongest of emotions and because he was frequently seen as never wholly belonging to the twentieth century, despite living in it for 63 years. This influence of the past was marked by his contemporaries. Clement Attlee compared Churchill to a layer cake: “One layer was certainly seventeenth century. The eighteenth century in him is obvious. There was the nineteenth century, and a large slice, of course, of the twentieth century; and another, curious layer which may have been the twentyfirst” (Manchester 1983–88, 12).

Never quite accepted by either party, Churchill’s major interest lay in ensuring the future of Great Britain and the British Empire. In his writing, this worldview is most apparent. Violet Bonham Carter wrote that, although quick to adapt new technology, fundamentally Churchill was “imbued with a historic sense of tradition, he was untrammeled by convention” (Bonham Carter 1965, 11).

Equally apparent was his interest in the military and its role in statecraft. More than half of the 56 books Churchill wrote dealt with war and warriors. One biographer held that Churchill believed, like Nietzsche, Carlyle, and Gobineau, and contrary to his contemporaries, that the “great issues of his day would be decided on the battlefield . . . that war was a legitimate political instrument . . . ” (Manchester 1983–88, 14). Indeed the great ideologies of his day were tested on the battlefields of Europe and Asia, in several great and bloody conflicts, again a historical fact of which Churchill was profoundly aware. He took a special interest in defense matters, actually serving as first lord of the Admiralty twice. During World War II, he took an active role, not always welcome, in strategy and policy. But to insist that Churchill was so rooted in tradition, military glory, and history is to ignore the political survivor.

Winston Churchill lasted almost sixty years in the House of Commons as a member of two political parties. He was prime minister twice and chancellor of the Exchequer once. He also nearly cashiered his career in the 1930s, running afoul of

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the Conservative leadership, including Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, but emerged as one of the few consistent critics of the rising dictators such as Adolf Hitler. He remained a member of parliament for his entire career, a place where his oratory made a difference, whether in defense or opposition of policy or proposed legislation.

In a century with few larger-than-life figures, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill seems to loom larger than most as a result of both his actions and, importantly, his own literary legacy—itself influenced in large part by the historical giants of the nineteenth century and the Whig tradition they fostered. As times change, the Whig influence has become more suspect, but its optimistic depiction of the evolution of the British past was certainly one Churchill returned to throughout his life.

Archives

Churchill’s papers have been deposited in the Churchill Archives at Churchill College, Cambridge.

There are also copies of his correspondence with Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York.

Documents on Churchill’s official career are in the Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, London.

Printed Sources

Alldritt, Keith. Churchill the Writer: His Life as a Man of Letters (London: Hutchinson, 1992). Barrett, Buckley Barry. Churchill: A Concise Bibliography (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2000). A comprehensive list of both the writings of Churchill and those that have been

produced about all aspects of his life and career.

Bonham Carter, Lady Violet. Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1965).

Churchill, Randolph S., Winston S. Churchill, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1966–67). Gilbert, Martin. Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1991). The one-volume condensa-

tion of the official biography.

———. Winston S. Churchill, 6 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1971–88). The official biography, the first two volumes by Randolph Churchill, the subsequent six by Martin Gilbert. There are 16 volumes of companion papers to the official biography, edited by Gilbert, and published between 1967 and 2000.

Holley, Darrell. Churchill’s Literary Allusions: An Index to the Education of a Soldier, Statesman and Litterateur ( Jefferson, N.C.; London: McFarland & Co., 1987).

Jenkins, Roy. Churchill (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

Manchester, William. The Last Lion, Winston Spencer Churchill (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983–88).

Plumb, J. H. “The Historian.” In A. J. P. Taylor et al., Churchill Revised: A Critical Assessment (New York: Dial Press, 1969), 133–69.

Rose, Norman. The Unruly Giant (New York: Free Press, 1994).

Phyllis Soybel

COLETTE, SIDONIE-GABRIELLE (1873–1954)

Colette was a French writer born at Saint-Saveur-en-Puisaye, France, where she attended grammar school. In 1893, she married the writer and critic Henri Gauthier-Villars (“Willy”), age 35. Indifferent to religion or convention, her true loyalty was to writing. Her husband forced her to write but had her work published

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under his own name. Colette left her husband in 1906. During this time, she met the Marquise de Balbeuf, an affluent lesbian. Colette’s divorce from Willy was finalized in 1910, and in 1912 she married Henry de Jouvenel, the editor-in-chief of Le Matin. In 1934, Colette divorced Henry de Jouvenel. One year later, she married Maurice Goudeket, who was also a writer. Colette was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy in 1935. She was also made a grand officer of the Legion d’honneur. In 1945, she became the first woman elected to the Académie Goncourt. Colette died in Paris on August 3, 1954.

Colette’s earliest works made up the collection that would henceforth be called the “Claudine” novels. These novels were inspired by Colette’s own experiences. Colette’s familiarity with the music hall and the time that she spent in the company of the Marquise inspired two additional novels. From 1913, she published novels that treated the romantic relationships that existed between men and women, semiautobiographical works that looked back upon life in the countryside and the innocent childhood that she had spent there, and works that focused on characteristics of female sexuality.

It was both her father’s literary connections and those of her first husband, Willy, that permitted Colette to become involved in writing. Willy had access to the most important artistic, literary, and musical circles of the era, and Colette soon became intimate with members of the most important literary groups. Colette frequented the Paris of the 1890s. This was the Paris of André Gide, Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, and Paul Valéry. As a young woman of 20, she plunged herself into the novels and poems of these famous writers, all of whose works Colette had esteemed. She admired Gide’s novel L’Immoraliste (1902), which was a study of how ethical concepts conflict with traditional conventions of morality, and Zola’s famous “J’accuse” letter (1898), in which Zola attacked French officials for their persecution of the French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had been found guilty of treason. Colette’s favorite writers, and those that influenced her the most, were Honoré de Balzac and her contemporary Marcel Proust, born two years before she was.

Colette’s literary works have affinities with both Balzac and Proust. Like her contemporary Proust, she was a diligent and determined writer who struggled persistently through revision after revision in order to find the perfect expression to convey to her reader her thoughts. Like Balzac’s characters, hers are often larger than life, and like Balzac she tended to recycle characters throughout various novels in order to show their character development over time. Like his La Comédie humaine (1842–48), which Colette read, loved, and admired, her works examine individuals of a certain social milieu at a certain time in order to show a slice of life on the literary page. Nevertheless, Colette’s literary creations are much more autobiographical in nature than those of Balzac.

Archives

La Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France, Colette, Cabinet des Manuscrits. University of Texas at Austin, Collection “Manuscrits,” Colette, Carlton Lake Collection.

Printed Sources

Lottman, Herbert R. Colette: A Life (London: Minerva, 1991).

Thurman, Judith. Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000).

Richard J. Gray II

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Collins, Michael

COLLINS, MICHAEL (1890–1922)

Michael Collins was born in 1890 near Clonakilty, County Cork, an area of constant conflict between Irish tenant farmers and landlords. Michael was the youngest of the eight children of Michael Sr. and Marianne Collins. His father, who died when Michael was six, was an educated Catholic farmer and a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Michael was educated at the Lisavaird National School under the tutelage of Denis Lyons, also an active member of the IRB. Lyons eagerly taught the physical force republicanism of Theobald Wolfe Tone, and according to Collins, infused in him “a pride of the Irish as a race.” Collins trained for the postal examination at the Clonakilty National School and worked as a postal clerk and stockbroker in London (1906–15) prior to joining the IRB and participating in the Easter Rising of 1916. Following imprisonment, he became an influential member of the Irish Republican Army and the Irish Volunteers. Elected to the Dail from South Cork, Collins served as minister of home affairs and minister of finance. During the Anglo-Irish War he coordinated military strategies and organized highly effective urban guerrilla warfare against the British. As minister of finance, Collins reluctantly helped negotiate the Anglo-Irish treaty. With the outbreak of the Irish Civil War in 1922, he was named commander in chief of the Free State army, but was assassinated in August by anti-treaty Irregulars.

Even at a young age Collins read eclectically. Along with the works of Shakespeare and other English classics, he read the traditional Irish novels, poems, ballads, and Fenian folklore that helped to form a historical and cultural basis for his nationalism. The works of John Banim and Thomas Kickham, describing the plight of oppressed Irish tenants, were among his favorite Irish novels. According to Frank O’Connor, he wept over the peasant sufferings depicted in Kickham’s Knocknagow. Collins enjoyed the theater, especially the plays of Shaw and Barrie. He also read works by W. B. Yeats, Padraig Colum, James Stephens, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennet, Joseph Conrad, and Algernon Swinburne. Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” became especially poignant during his imprisonment.

Collins drew political inspiration from the writings of Thomas Davis, propagandist of the Young Ireland revolt of 1848, and from the songs and stories of A. M. Sullivan, T. D. Sullivan, and Thomas Moore. Analytical editorials by Arthur Griffith in the United Irishmen and D. P. Moran in The Leader provided systematic criticism of the social and economic struggles of the Irish people and established a political tone that Collins eventually adopted, somewhere between the wildness of perpetual violence and the propriety of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which he dismissed as “slaves of England” (Coogan 1996, 14). Collins seems to have been influenced in his approach to the Anglo-Irish War by G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday—given to him by Joseph Plunkett—in which the main anarchist suggests that “If you don’t seem to be hiding, nobody hunts you out.” According to O’Connor, Collins’s “reading regularly outdistanced his powers of reflection,” and the sources of his action are almost always to be found in the tales and experiences of his youth (O’Connor 1965, 19).

Archives

State Paper Office of Ireland, Dublin. Official papers. His private papers are widely scattered, many in private hands. See Coogan 1996, 461–63.

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Copland, Aaron

Printed Sources

Coogan, Tim Pat. Michael Collins: The Man Who Made Ireland (Boulder, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart, 1996).

O’Connor, Frank. The Big Fellow, rev. ed. (Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds, 1965).

John Grady Powell

COPLAND, AARON (1900–1990)

Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Harris, and his mother, Sarah (née Mittenthal), immigrated to America from Russia. A year before their marriage in 1885, Harris Copland opened a department store in Brooklyn. Aaron, along with his four brothers and sisters, helped in the family store. The Coplands belonged to a synagogue in Brooklyn and observed the Jewish high holy days.

At age six, Aaron attended School No. 111, graduating from School No. 9 in 1914. His oldest brother Ralph studied violin, while his sister Laurine played the piano. Laurine also took singing lessons at the Metropolitan Opera School. Inspired by his older brother and sister, Aaron soon became very interested in music. At age 14, he began his piano studies with Leopold Wolfsohn. As early as 1915, Copland had decided to pursue a career in music. In 1917, Copland commenced studies in composition with Rubin Goldmark. After his graduation from Boys’ High in 1918, Copland decided not to attend college. Instead, he continued his private studies in piano and composition while working as a pianist. In 1921, Copland left for three years of study in Paris. While attending the summer program in the Palace of Fontainebleau, Copland met Nadia Boulanger, who was to become his composition teacher during his stay in Paris. Before his return to America, Boulanger introduced Copland to the conductor, Serge Koussevitzky. At Koussevitzky’s suggestion, Copland composed his first major work, which was to feature Boulanger as soloist. The Symphony for Organ and Orchestra premiered on January 11, 1925, with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch.

In his book Copland: 1900–1942 (written in collaboration with Vivian Perlis), Copland makes many references to his love of reading. He recalls looking forward to lunch breaks while working on Wall Street during the summer of 1918, “because I had come upon a basement bookstore that sold second-hand books in French. It was there that I invested in my first French book, a battered copy of Alphonse Daudet’s play Sappho” (Copland 1984, 25). Copland’s close friend, Aaron Schaffer, was a student of French and French literature at Johns Hopkins University. Describing Schaffer’s influence, Copland states, “My new friend advised me about literature, his own field, and at about this time I began to read voraciously, adding French literature to the Horatio Alger and Mark Twain I was already familiar with” (Copland 1984, 26). For Copland, “reading became a passion second only to music” (Copland 1984, 28–29). He frequented the Brooklyn Public Library, familiarizing himself with the writings of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, as well as Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe and Walt Whitman’s I Hear America Singing

(Copland 1984, 28). Finally, in an undated letter written to his parents from Paris, Copland acknowledges the importance of reading in his life, stating, “I read not to learn anything, but from the pure love of it” (Copland 1984, 82).

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Copland’s lifelong appreciation of reading provided inspiration for many of his compositions. Richard Barnefield, Edward Arlington Robinson, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Alfred Hayes, George Meredith, John Barbour, Genevieve Taggard, and Emily Dickinson are among the many poets represented in Copland’s works. He wrote scores for several films based on the literary works of Alex Karmel, Henry James, John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, and Lillian Hellman. Copland’s other compositions include two operas, incidental music for several plays, ballet music, symphonies and concerti, music for the piano, chamber music, and songs.

In addition to his accomplishments as a composer, pianist, conductor, and educator, Copland was a prolific writer. He wrote numerous magazine and newspaper articles, illustrating both the trends and controversies surrounding twentieth-cen- tury American music. He strongly expressed his faith in the future of the American composer and his music. His four books—What to Listen for In Music, Our New Music (later renamed The New Music 1900–1960), Music and Imagination, and Copland on Music—are written for a broad audience and can be appreciated by the nonmusician as well as the specialist.

Archives

Copland Collection at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

New York Public Library.

Printed Sources

Berger, Arthur. Aaron Copland. [1953] (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971). Butterworth, Neil. The Music of Aaron Copland (New York: Toccata Press–Universe Books,

1985).

Copland, Aaron. Copland on Music (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1944).

———.Copland Since 1943 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).

———.Music and Imagination [1952] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

———.The New Music 1900–1960, rev. and enlarged ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1968). Reprint of Our New Music, 1941.

———.What To Listen For In Music, rev. ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1957).

Copland, Aaron, and Vivian Perlis. Copland: 1900–1942 (New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984).

Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999).

Skowronski, Joann. Aaron Copland: A Bio-Bibliography. Bio-Bibliographies In Music, Number 2 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985).

Marianne Wilson

COWARD, SIR NOËL PEIRCE (1899–1973)

Noël Coward was born on December 16, 1899, at Teddington, Middlesex, to Arthur and Violet Coward, both of whom had a passion for music. Coward’s formal education was “sporadic” and often interrupted, so much of his learning was selfdirected. Coward’s mother frequently took him to the theater, and by age 12 he was acting professionally; by 14 he was famous. He did several shows with Sir Charles Hawtrey, from whom he learned the mechanics of writing and theatrical production. In June 1915, Mrs. Astley Cooper invited Coward to stay at her manor house

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at Hambleton, a visit which brought him into contact with the world of England’s upper classes, from which he would derive much of his support as well as material for much of his comedy. By 1916 Coward was writing his own songs and plays. After brief service in the army in 1918, Coward returned to the theater. In 1920 he first performed in his own play, I’ll Leave It to You. Though praised by reviewers, the play closed quickly. His first critical and financial success came in 1924 with The Vortex, a serious play about drug addiction. After this came a rush of successes, and by the mid-1930s, Coward was well established as a darling of the London and New York stages, though less as an actor, and more and more as a writer, producer, and composer. During the Second World War he produced several shows, including his longest-running comedy, Blythe Spirit (1941) and the war film In Which We Serve (1942). After the war, his comedy was less well received, though Coward continued to have commercial success. A few more plays and his only novel appeared in the 1960s. During this time he was “rediscovered,” and in 1970 he received a knighthood in England and a special Tony Award in America. He died at home in Jamaica on March 26, 1973. As Somerset Maugham had predicted, Coward greatly influenced English theater from the 1930s through the 1950s, but he has also been honored for giving the British some of their most beloved songs of the midcentury. Coward’s lifestyle, having come from modest origins to summering in Switzerland and wintering in the Caribbean, as much as anything reflected the growing impact of theater and film on the culture of the twentieth century.

Because his education was picked up between performances, it is not surprising that many of his influences were theatrical. In youth Coward read Oscar Wilde, Laurence Hope, Omar Khayyam, Marcel Proust, and Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki. Saki proved to be the single greatest influence on Coward, especially in the emphasis on youth and in the style of his “homosexual but very English sensibility” (Hoare 1996, 41). In 1922, Coward produced his play The Young Idea, which borrowed “shamelessly” from George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell. Shaw, not offended, warned Coward that he ought not to imitate him, lest he be out of date too soon, a criticism Coward took to heart. Prior to the start of World War II, Coward had gathered a close-knit group of friends—his “family” he sometimes called them—which included Cole Lesley, Graham Payn, Joyce Cary, Lorn Loraine, and Gladys Calthrop, from whom he gained both insight and encouragement. Although not immune to the barbs of critics, he often acknowledged their justice and was aware that his personality and flair for performance often overshadowed his writing.

Archives

Diaries, correspondence, some letters, and other papers. Birmingham University Special Collections Department.

Other correspondence is spread among many archives and one is encouraged to search the Historical Manuscript Commission databases and the Location Register of TwentiethCentury English Literary Manuscripts and Letters (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988).

Printed Sources

Hoare, Philip. Noël Coward: a Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Most widely respected and accessible biography.

Lesley, Cole. The Life of Noël Coward (New York: Penguin Books, 1978). An early “official” biography from one who knew him well.

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Levin, Milton. Noël Coward, Updated Version (Twayne’s English Author Series, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989). Provides a helpful introduction to Coward’s plays and writings.

Richard R. Follett

CROCE, BENEDETTO (1866–1952)

Benedetto Croce was born in Pescasseroli, Italy, the son of rich landed gentry on both sides. He wrote in his autobiography that at the age of six or seven his greatest love was already books. His mother encouraged his reading, which in his childhood included the romances of Father Antonio Bresciani, Tommaso Grossi, and, in Italian translation, Canon Christoph von Schmid, Marie Risteau (“Sophie”) Cottin, and Sir Walter Scott. He attended exclusive Catholic schools in Naples, where he read, sometimes on the sly, Bertrando Spaventa, Silvio Pellico, Ferdinando Martini, Francesco De Sanctis, and Giosuè Carducci. When both his parents and a sister were killed by an earthquake in 1883, Croce, severely injured, became the ward of his father’s cousin, the politician Silvio Spaventa, in Rome. At first miserable there and contemplating suicide, he recovered his spirits by sequestering himself in the Dominican library of Casanatense.

Croce’s turn toward philosophy came during his second year in Rome when he attended Antonio Labriola’s lectures at the university. The doubts he had secretly entertained in Naples about his mother’s traditional Catholic piety now grew more forceful. Returning to Naples in 1886, he immersed himself for the next six years in Neapolitan history and began writing for publication. In 1893, influenced by Giambattista Vico’s New Science, Croce wrote his first of many works on the philosophy of art. Encouraged by Labriola, he began intensive study of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Giovanni Gentile, and Johann Friedrich Herbart. On his own he became familiar with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, St. Augustine, Alexander Baumgarten, René Descartes, Antonio Rosmini, Wilhelm Dilthey, Herbert Spencer, Gabriele d’Annunzio, medieval scholasticism, and Immanuel Kant. By 1905 he was an articulate, self-taught philosopher.

In the 1890s Croce contributed articles to leftist journals such as Le Devenir and corresponded with Georges Sorel and Vilfredo Pareto. In 1902 he founded his own bimonthly journal, La Critica, which lasted until 1943 and was noted for being quite derogatory toward academic philosophers, especially Antonio Fogazzaro, Giovanni Pascoli, and d’Annunzio. He engaged the psychological theories of Cesare Lombroso, Paolo Mantegazza, Émile Zola, and Claude Bernard. As a philosopher, he sided with idealism against the then dominant positivism, neo-Kantianism, utilitarianism, and scientism of Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, Roberto Ardigò, Hippolyte Taine, and others, drawing inspiration from Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Bernard Bosanquet, and even early British empiricists such as John Locke and George Berkeley. Yet the main sources of his thought remained mostly Italian, primarily Vico.

Archives

The Croce Library (Biblioteca Benedetto Croce) was created in Naples in 1955 along with the organization that oversees it, the Croce Foundation (Fondazione Benedetto Croce). Collaborating with the Italian Institute for Historical Studies (Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici), part of its mission is to preserve Croce’s personal library and papers and to collect primary research materials about him.

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Printed Sources

Brescia, Giuseppe. Croce Inedito: 1881–1952 (Napoli: Società Editrice Napoletana, 1984). Corsi, Mario. Le Origini del Pensiero di Benedetto Croce (Napoli: Giannini, 1974).

Croce, Benedetto. An Autobiography, Robin George Collingwood (trans.), (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1970).

De Feo, Italo. Croce: L’Uomo e l’Opera (Milano: Mondadori, 1975).

Franchini, Raffaello. Note Biografiche di Benedetto Croce (Torino: Edizioni Radio Italiana, 1953).

Marra, Dora. Conversazioni con Benedetto Croce su Alcuni Libri della sua Biblioteca (Milano: Hoepli, 1952).

Orsini, Gian N. G. Benedetto Croce: Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961).

Roberts, David D. Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

Scirocco, Giovanni. Croce: La Vita, l’Itinerario, il Pensiero (Milano: Academia, 1973). Sprigge, Cecil Jackson Squire. Benedetto Croce: Man and Thinker (New Haven, Yale Univer-

sity Press, 1952).

Eric v.d. Luft

CUMMINGS, EDWARD ESTLING (1894–1962)

Popularly known as “e.e.cummings,” he was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894, and died in North Conway, New Hampshire, September 3, 1962. He was educated at Cambridge Latin School and at Harvard College, where in 1915 he received his A.B., graduating magna cum laude in Greek and English; he received his A.M. from Harvard in 1916. Cummings’s father was a Unitarian minister whose influence in the development of his son’s open, playful, and free-from- dogma approach to the world cannot be doubted. There was an early period of personal rebellion against Unitarian piety and the settled ethos of Cambridge. Cummings’s great love for his father and for his mother, a strong-willed and fearless person, is clearly shown in an autobiographical presentation he gave at Harvard in 1953: i–six nonlectures. By 1918, Cummings had created his highly eccentric poetic style. That style, which broke with standard grammatical rules and usage, placed him in the vanguard of experimental, radical, and “frontier-breaking” literary achievement. His corpus of over 500 poems, produced from his start as early as 1916 until his death 46 years later, has received ample critical acclaim and establishes unquestionably that Cummings’s oeuvre contributed significantly in the larger domain of poetry in English.

Cummings’s career as an innovator did not emerge suddenly, without experience or acquaintance with the conventional Western literary tradition. He learned from earlier poetic and prose forms: the Pindaric ode, Elizabethan song, eighteenthcentury satire, the works of Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emily Dickinson. His nonlecture about himself at Harvard reveals his reading in Aeschylus, Homer, and the French troubadours. He had gained skill in poetic forms with definite rules: villanelle, roundel, ballade royale, and sonnet. Thus solidly based, he forged ahead in his work as a poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist in a highly individualistic, confident, and enlivening way.

Cummings was also well-read in other authors pertinent to his studies: Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gaius Valerius Catullus, and Sappho. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was his early idol. He was drawn away from him and

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