Dictionary of Literary Influences

Djilas, Milovan

Archives

The Walt Disney Archive, Walt Disney Corporate Headquarters, 500 South Buena Vista,

Burbank, California.

Printed Sources

Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968).

Thomas, Bob. Walt Disney: An American Original (New York: Hyperion, 1976).

Ann Shillinglaw

DJILAS, MILOVAN (1911–1995)

Milovan Djilas was born in Podbisˇc´e, Montenegro. Desiring a just social order, in contrast to the rule of clans and blood feuds in his native land, Djilas became a supporter of communism while a student in secondary school and was an active member of the Party at the University of Belgrade in the early 1930s. He was imprisoned by Yugoslavia’s royal dictatorship for his political activities (1933–36). A convinced Stalinist, he acted as a propagandist and recruiter for the Party in the late 1930s. During World War II, Djilas served as a principal lieutenant to Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) in the Partisan army. Near the end of the war and immediately afterward, he visited Moscow as a representative of Tito and the Yugoslav communists. These visits became the basis of his book Conversations with Stalin (1962), a seminal portrait of the Soviet dictator. Djilas held the posts of vice president of communist Yugoslavia and president of the Federal Assembly following the war. His warnings against the expanding bureaucratic state and calls for intellectual freedom led to his ouster from leadership in January 1954. In March 1954 he resigned from the Party. Between 1956 and 1966 he was tried six times for crimes against the state and imprisoned for a total of nine years. Djilas continued to write during this time, publishing his works outside Yugoslavia. Among his books are the classic critiques of the communist state: The New Class (1957), The Unperfect Society (1969), and Fall of the New Class (1998). In the late 1980s and 1990s Djilas turned his criticism to the nationalist regime of Slobodan Milosˇevic´.

In the diary he kept during his imprisonment under the Communist regime, Djilas noted in one entry three authors as major influences on his literary and intellectual development: Njegosˇ, Dostoyevsky, and Marx. Primary among these was Petar Petrovic´ Njegosˇ (1813–51), the national bard of Djilas’s native Montenegro. Djilas drew from Njegosˇ’s epic poetry a romantic vision and an awareness of the individual’s proclivities to both good and evil, and he paid homage to Njegosˇ by writing a biographical study (Njegosˇ: Poet, Prince, Bishop, 1966) that he hoped would introduce the poet to a non-Yugoslav audience. Djilas discovered Fyodor Dostoyevsky when Djilas was a student in secondary school. Initially moved by the Russian writer’s depiction of the realities of human existence and the belief of his characters in a more just society, Djilas cited Dostoyevsky as one of the principal influences in his move toward communism. Later, after his imprisonment, he reread many of Dostoyevsky’s works and understood that Dostoyevsky proposed an entirely different philosophical path: “He is not only an author of genius and a thinker, but he also creates a new spiritual world. It may be that he is even a new civilization” (Djila 1975, 110). Because Djilas had adopted communism out of a sincere desire for

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social justice and equality, inspired by his reading of Dostoyevsky and authors such as Immanuel Kant and Jean Jacques Rousseau, he was already an adherent to the ideology when he first read Karl Marx. Even after his resignation from the League of Yugoslav Communists and his realization that Marxism’s claims to universal truth were false, Djilas maintained an appreciation for Marx’s humanistic critique of capitalism and his vision of an ideal society. Djilas believed that his warning against the bureaucratic state, The New Class, was a Marxist book, and he held that twentieth-century Marxist regimes had nothing in common with Marx’s original ideas.

Archives

Yugoslav Biographical Files I, 1948-1991, in the Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest. Clippings from Yugoslav and foreign press, news agency releases, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty research papers, and excepts from Yugoslav radio broadcasting on Djilas.

Printed Sources

Djilas, Milovan. Parts of a Lifetime, Michael and Deborah Milenkovitch (eds.), (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).

Reinhartz, Dennis. Milovan Djilas: A Revolutionary as Writer (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1981).

Bruce R. Berglund

DOS PASSOS, JOHN (1896–1970)

John Dos Passos was born in a Chicago hotel room, the son of an illegitimate union between a successful married corporate lawyer, John R. Dos Passos, who could recite entire scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, and the widowed Lucy Addison Sprigg, whom he eventually married in 1910. John Madison—he would not take his father’s name until he was sixteen (Pizer 1988, 12)— would become one of the primary post–World War I chroniclers of American culture. Dos Passos’s childhood was varied, having no stable home, friends, routine, or consistent company of his father. After beginning his education miserable in an English boarding school, Dos Passos entered the Choate School in Connecticut under the name of John Madison in 1907. He remained there until 1911. In 1912, at the age of 15, Dos Passos entered Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard in 1916, Dos Passos served three tours in World War I, in the Norton-Harjes ambulance service in France, the American Red Cross ambulance service in Italy, and in 1918 he enlisted in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. After leaving the army, Dos Passos, then an ardent socialist though reluctant to associate himself officially with the Communist party, began his prolific literary career. Dos Passos’s socialist leanings were apparent in his writing for The New Masses and The Daily Worker, and his direction of the New Playwright’s Theatre in New York (1926–29). In the following decades, Dos Passos produced a series of novels that would make him one of the most innovative of a generation of important novelists of the post–World War I period, including Ernest Hemingway (who sustained a decade-long friendship with Dos Passos) and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In his greatest novels, Dos Passos described “the Great Betrayal” following the First World War. In Three Soldiers (1921), Manhattan

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Transfer (1925), and his trilogy U.S.A. (published as a single volume in 1938), Dos Passos attempts to capture and recreate the manifold complexities (political, economic, cultural) of the United States in the years following World War I.

It was at Harvard that Dos Passos’s unique novelistic technique began to develop. While there, Dos Passos discovered both impressionistic painting and the forming literary modernist movement, reading early Eliot poems in Blast (Becker 1974, 22). Dos Passos was also influenced by the budding imagist movement, reviewing the work of Edgar Lee Masters, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound for the Harvard Advocate. The movement differed drastically from Dos Passos’s other influences, which included the realist novels of Flaubert, to whom Dos Passos credits his having learned an “obsession with the mot juste” (Becker 1974, 17), and those of Theodore Dreiser, whom Dos Passos befriended. Noting that while at Harvard “many of us chose to live in the 1890’s,” Dos Passos cites The Yellow Book (ed. Henry Harland), The Hound of Heaven (Francis Thompson), and Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams as particularly important in his formative college years (Knowles 1981, 219). These fantastical texts, coupled with his readings of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, and the Belgian poet Emile Varharen, all contributed to Dos Passos’s later themes of socialism, travel, and recording the inner voices of his characters. Additionally, in a 1960 interview, Dos Passos cites Frank Norris, the Italian futurists, Arthur Rimbaud, Stendahl’s Chartruse De Parme, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett as all being influential on his writing (Pizer 1988, 239). As early as 1915, Dos Passos declared, “by all the gods of Flaubert, of Homer, of modern realism and the new poetry, . . . that Prize fights are every bit as good a subject for poetry as fine ladies and illicit love affairs” (Becker 1974, 17). Thus, Dos Passos’s influences include lyrical imagism coupled with realist subject matter, contemporary political and cultural motifs, and varied political stances, which all converged to make Dos Passos one of the most important observers, chroniclers, and novelists of the twentieth century.

Archives

John Dos Passos Archive at the University of Virginia, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia.

John Dos Passos Collection, Mcfarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

John Dos Passos Collection, Founders Memorial Library, Northern Illinois University, De Kalb, Illlinois.

John Dos Passos Collection, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Printed Sources

Becker, George. John Dos Passos (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1974). Davis, Robert. John Dos Passos (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962).

Knowles, A.S. Jr. “John Dos Passos.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 9 (Detroit: Gale Research Group, 1981), 217–36.

Ludington, Townsend. John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1980).

——— (ed.). The Fourteenth Chronicle; Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos (Boston: Gambit, 1973).

Pizer, Donald. Dos Passos’ U.S.A.: A Critical Study (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1988).

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Dubcˇek, Alexander

——— (ed.). John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfiction Prose (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988).

Spencer Carr, Virginia. Dos Passos: A Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984). Wagner, Linda. Dos Passos: Artist as American (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).

James Mellis

DUBCˇ EK, ALEXANDER (1921–1992)

Alexander Dubcˇek was born in Uhrovec, in western Slovakia. His father, a carpenter and Communist Party member, brought the family to the Kirghiz Soviet Republic in 1925 to help build the new socialist state. The family lived in Kirghizstan until 1930, when they moved to Gorky (now Nizhni Novgorod) where Dubcˇek completed his schooling. The family returned to Slovakia in 1938, and Dubcˇek held a variety of menial jobs. During the war he took part in the communist-led resistance against the Nazi-client regime in Slovakia, and he was wounded in the armed uprising of 1944 that was put down by German troops. Following the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s takeover in February 1948, Dubcˇek rose quickly in the ranks. He was sent to the Party’s High Political School in Moscow (1955–58), was named committee secretary in the Slovak capital of Bratislava upon his return, became First Party secretary in Slovakia in 1963, and was a member of the Party Presidium from 1962 to 1969. An advocate of political and economic reform and a defender of Slovak interests in the multinational state, Dubcˇek succeeded the hardliner Antonín Novotny´ as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in January 1968. As head of the Party leadership in Prague, Dubcˇek elevated reform-minded members, who drafted a blueprint for the creation of a “new model of socialist democracy.” The Action Program, adopted in April 1968, was official policy during the period of dramatic reforms known as the Prague Spring. On August 21, 1968, these reforms came to an end as Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia. Dubcˇek was kidnapped by KGB troops and forced in Moscow to agree to concessions. He resigned his leadership post in April 1969 and was expelled from the Party in 1970. He worked as a mechanic in Slovakia until November 1989, when he returned to Prague, appearing alongside Václav Havel at the antiregime demonstrations. After the fall of the communist government, he served as chairman of the Federal Assembly until his death in a car accident on September 1, 1992.

Dubcˇek’s early education was sporadic and marred by Soviet ideology: the school in the Kirghiz town where his family settled lacked sufficient textbooks and trained teachers, while his schooling in Gorky took place under the most rigid years of Stalinism. As Dubcˇek recalled, “Even when the instruction was good in strictly pedagogical terms, it was too heavily burdened with Marxist-Leninist ideology and hardly conducive to independent thinking” (Dubcˇek, 25–26). Although he was uncertain about the Party’s explanation of the purges, Dubcˇek could not bring himself to question the rule of Stalin and the Communist Party. Dubcˇek first studied Marxism-Leninism when he was sent to High Political School in 1955. While in Moscow, he took particular interest in the lesser-known writings of Karl Marx (1818–1883), including The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). He questioned the limited perspective of the Party school’s curriculum, and he also became aware of the incongruities between the ideas of Marx and those of Vladimir Lenin. In particular, he questioned why the focus of socialist activities should not be in an

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advanced industrial state, such as Czechoslovakia or East Germany, rather than backward Russia. Another important influence on his political thinking was events in Moscow during his time there; his studies at the High Political School coincided with the beginnings of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union, including the 1956 “Secret Speech” by Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) denouncing Josef Stalin’s cult of personality. Upon becoming head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1968, Dubcˇek was convinced of the need for economic reform and greater participation in governance. Consistent throughout Dubcˇek’s life was his love of the Slovak nation, and he took pride in the fact that he had been born in the same house as

ˇ

the poet L’udovit Stur (1815–56), the founder of the Slovak literary language.

Archives

Archive of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, State Central Archive, Prague, Czech Republic.

Printed Sources

Dubcˇek, Alexander, with Andra Sugar, Dubcek Speaks (London: I.B. Tauris, 1990).

———. Hope Dies Last: The Autobiography of Alexander Dubcˇek, Jirˇí Hochmann (trans. and ed.), (New York: Kodansha, 1993).

Shawcross, William. Dubcek: Dubcˇek and Czechoslovakia 1918–1990 (London: Hogarth, 1990).

Bruce R. Berglund

DUCHAMP, MARCEL (1887–1968)

Marcel Duchamp, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, first achieved notoriety with his painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which was singled out at the Armory Show (1913). He invented “readymades,” everyday objects elevated to the status of art, left his Large Glass (1915–23) “definitively unfinished,” constructed a female alter ego for himself in Rrose Sélavy (1920), and played chess obsessively. In the 1920s and 1930s he came into contact with the European Dada groups, then was courted by André Breton and the surrealists.

Duchamp was born in Blainville, a suburb of Rouen, and received an upper- middle-class education at the Lycée Corneille. He later sporadically attended the Académie Julian, a private art school. He worked briefly as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (1913–14). Later in life he admitted, perhaps too modestly, to being unable to read complex works. This has not prevented scholars from searching for hermeneutic keys to his art that have included alchemical and cabalistic literature. Altogether, he is regarded as a most literary artist because of the importance of language in his art. When he did admit to influences, he cited authors rather than artists. Duchamp was influenced by the Symbolists of the 1880s and 1890s, particularly the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Jules Laforgue. Duchamp liked Laforgue’s prose narratives, Moralités légendaires (Moral Tales), especially his ironic retelling of Hamlet, and a group of drawings from 1911and 1912 have direct references to Laforgue’s poetry (“Encore á cet astre,” for instance). Early in his career, while Duchamp was still allied to the cubists, he was encouraged by Guillaume Apollinaire. On a trip to Switzerland in 1912, Duchamp heard the poet read Zone for the first time. His Large Glass (1915–23), a monumental glass

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piece filled with parodic mechanical imagery, may reflect its influence. Duchamp was decisively influenced by his experience of avant-garde theater, especially the absurdist plays of Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel. A 1912 performance of Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique, a proto-surrealist burlesque about a group of shipwreck survivors, galvanized Duchamp’s interests in linguistic invention and, as he said, “the madness of the unexpected.” His pieces that utilize the effects of chance may demonstrate the artist’s appreciation for Alfred Jarry’s satirical “pataphysics” as articulated in Jarry’s novel, Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (written 1898; published in 1911). Additionally, Jarry’s short, blasphemous “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race” (1903) may have inspired Duchamp’s 1914 drawing To Have the Apprentice in the Sun (1914). Finally, Duchamp’s Large Glass

(1915–23) may demonstrate an awareness of the bizarre mechanomorphism of Jarry’s Le Surmâle (The Supermale, 1902) in which an oversexed hero makes love mechanically to an American girl. Along similar lines, the splintery nude woman in Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) has been linked to the future woman in Villier de L’Isle Adam’s L’Eve future (1886).

Archives

The preponderance of Duchamp’s artworks are housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the Walter and Louise Arensberg Collection. Yale University and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, have other works. Examples of Duchamp’s box projects, reproductions, and multiples exist in collections worldwide.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia, Penn. Unpublished material and correspondence.

Printed Sources

Cabanne, Pierre. Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Belfond, 1967); Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Ron Padgett (trans.), (New York: Viking Press, 1977).

Duchamp, Marcel. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.), (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

Schwarz, Arturo. The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Milan: Schwarz, 1997). Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996).

Mark B. Pohlad

DUMONT, FERNAND (1927–1997)

Born in Montmorency (now a quarter of Québec City, Canada) on June 24, 1927, French-Canadian social scientist Fernand Dumont is an example of a son of proletarians who became one of the most influential intellectuals in his country. After going to a local Catholic school in Beauport (1933–41) and high school at the Collège des Frères du Sacré-Cœur de Limoilou in Québec City (1942–45), Fernand Dumont went to the Petit Séminaire de Québec (1946–49) and then to the Université Laval (1949–53) in Québec City, where he got a master’s degree in social sciences. He did two Ph.D. theses: the first in Paris ( June 1967) in sociology and the second at Université Laval (1987) in theology. His writings range among field studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, theology, history, and social theory, but also include poetry and essays. From 1955 to 1995, he was professor of sociology at Université Laval, where he cofounded an academic journal, Recherches sociographiques, in 1960. He also cowrote the Livre blanc (White Book, 1977), which

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created Bill 101 regarding the importance of French language in Québec, in 1977. Dumont won many prizes for his books, including in 1969 the governor of Canada’s prestigious prize for his most influential book, Le Lieu de l’homme. La culture comme distance et mémoire (1968), introducing his theory of primary and secondary culture. He was the first president of the Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture (now INRS—Culture et société), in Québec City. He died of cancer on May 1, 1997.

When he was about ten years old, Dumont received as a school prize a copy of Robert Rumilly’s Mercier. He read this biography of the premier of the province of Québec, Honoré Mercier (1840–94) many times. Dumont began to read serious books around the age of thirteen under the guidance of his first school mentor, Brother George, who suggested Corneille’s plays and other French classics (Dumont and Cantin 2000, 43). While in tenth grade, Dumont worked at the Parlement Library in Québec City. There he discovered reading, as most of his previous schools had not had libraries. In his autobiography, Récit d’une émigration. Mémoires, Dumont remembered reading during this period Plato, G.W.F. Hegel, Alexis de Tocqueville, Émile Durkheim, Karl Jaspers, and Emmanuel Levinas (Dumont 2000, 54). While he was still young, he was impressed by a biography of Louis Pasteur (La vie de Pasteur) written by Pasteur’s grandson, René ValleryRadot. He also read articles by influential polemicists from Montreal, including historian Lionel Groulx and journalist André Laurendeau in journals such as L’Action française and L’Action nationale. While a student at Université Laval, Dumont appreciated Montesquieu and Auguste Comte. He didn’t like Karl Marx’s Capital, preferring Hegel’s Phenomenolog y of Spirit. Among sociologists, Dumont was fond of the French tradition in sociology, with authors such as Durkheim, François Simiand, Maurice Halbwachs, Célestin Charles Alfred Bouglé, and Marcel Mauss. With notable exceptions such as Everett C. Hughes’s famous study (French Canada in Transition, 1943), Dumont seldom mentioned authors from the United States, although many of his professors at Université Laval had studied in American universities. Later, while he lived in Paris (1953–55), Dumont said he was strongly influenced by his favorite professor at La Sorbonne, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, especially by his book on epistemology (La philosophie du non: essai d’une philosophie du nouvel esprit scientifique). Along with Bachelard, Dumont considered Emmanuel Mounier and another French philosopher, Maurice Blondel, as his intellectual masters. Apart from philosophy and sociology, the young Dumont also read playwrights such as Georges Bernanos, Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, and Shakespeare. A research chair on culture with the name of Fernand Dumont was created in Québec City in 1998; he is still considered the most important sociologist in Canadian history.

Archives

Chaire Fernand-Dumont, INRS Culture, société et urbanisation, Québec City, Canada. http://chaire_fernand_dumont.inrs-ucs.uquebec.ca/pdf/corpus_fernand-dumont.pdf.

Printed Sources

Dumont, Fernand. Récit d’une émigration. Mémoires (Montréal: Boréal, 1997). This intellectual autobiography details literary influences.

———. Un témoin de l’homme. Serge Cantin (ed.), (Montréal: Hexagone, 2000). Transcriptions of interviews given by Fernand Dumont between 1965 and 1996.

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———. The Vigil of Quebec [1971]; Sheila Fischman and Richard Howard (trans.), (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). Dumont’s only book translated in English, about the Canadian political crisis of October 1970.

Weinstein, Michael A. Culture Critique. Fernand Dumont and New Québec Sociolog y (New York: St. Martin Press, 1985).

Yves Laberge

DÜRRENMATT, FRIEDRICH (1921–1990)

Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born in Konolfingen, Switzerland, the son of Hulda Zimmermann and Reinhold Dürrenmatt, the village pastor, and the grandson of the poet, satirist, and politician Ulrich Dürrenmatt. He attended elementary school in nearby Grosshochstetten from 1933 to 1935, when his family moved to Bern because his father was appointed Protestant chaplain of the Salem Hospital. Dürrenmatt attended the Freies Gymnasium, Bern, from 1935 to 1937, then, despite failing to be promoted in 1939, graduated from the Humboldtianum School, Bern, in 1941. His father wanted him to become a minister, but, inspired more by his grandfather’s works than by his father’s conservative respectability, Dürrenmatt diverged toward art and literature.

Except for the 1942–43 winter semester at the University of Zürich, Dürrenmatt was enrolled from 1941 to 1946 at the University of Bern. He was not a good student and sometimes felt ashamed that after 10 semesters he still had no degree. Originally he intended to study literature and become a painter, but his interests soon shifted toward the study of philosophy and the goal of becoming an author and playwright. Among the philosophers he read were Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. He also read some theology and was particularly impressed by Karl Barth’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.

Among his Zürich professors was Emil Staiger, but Dürrenmatt thought him “highly pathetic” and gained more from informal evening sessions at the home of expressionist painter Walter Jonas, where the group would discuss the unconventional literature of Georg Büchner, Georg Heym, Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Georg Trakl, and others. Dürrenmatt may also have discovered Albert Camus, one of his most significant influences, around this time.

At Bern he studied under Fritz Strich, Emil Ermatinger, and Richard Herbertz. He spoke of writing a dissertation on Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of tragedy, but never did. Instead he began writing plays that expressed the Kierkegaardian existentialist/absurdist point of view more poignantly than a prose essay could. The grotesqueness of Hieronymus Bosch’s and George Grosz’s paintings affected Dürrenmatt’s subsequent stories and plays as much as did the absurdity of Kafka’s fiction.

Among the dramatists, poets, and literary authors he read in the early 1940s were Euripides, Sophocles, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Christoph Martin Wieland, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Hölderlin, August Strindberg, Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Gerhart Hauptmann, Thornton Wilder, Bertolt Brecht, Max Frisch, and his favorite, Aristophanes. Soon after he met his first wife, actress Lotti Geissler, in 1946, she starred in one of Henrik Ibsen’s plays at the Stadttheater in Basel.

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Archives

Dürrenmatt’s papers and memorabilia are at the Centre Dürrenmatt in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, the gift of his widow, Charlotte Kerr, in collaboration with the Schweizerisches Literaturarchiv (Swiss Archives of Literature) and the Friedrich-Dürrenmatt-Stiftung (Friedrich Dürrenmatt Foundation).

Printed Sources

Arnold, Armin. Friedrich Dürrenmatt (New York: Ungar, 1972).

Crockett, Roger Alan. Understanding Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998).

Fritzen, Bodo, and Heimy F. Taylor (eds.). Friedrich Dürrenmatt: A Collection of Critical Essays

(Normal, Ill.: Applied Literature Press, 1979).

Jenny, Urs. Dürrenmatt: A Study of His Plays, Keith Hamnett and Hugh Rorrison (trans.), (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978).

Lazar, Moshe (ed.). Play Dürrenmatt (Malibu: Undena, 1983). Peppard, Murray B. Friedrich Dürrenmatt (New York: Twayne, 1969).

Tiusanen, Timo. Dürrenmatt: A Study in Plays, Prose, Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

Whitton, Kenneth S. Dürrenmatt: Reinterpretation in Retrospect (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990).

———. The Theatre of Friedrich Dürrenmatt: A Study in the Possibility of Freedom (London: Wolff; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1980).

Eric v.d. Luft

DYLAN, BOB (1941– )

Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in Hibbing. He briefly attended the University of Minnesota, 1959–60, before dropping out to pursue his musical career beginning in the off-campus area known as Dinkytown. Bobby Zimmerman became the folksinger Bob Dillon and finally Bob Dylan. After reading Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory (1943), Dylan moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village. He frequently visited the ailing Guthrie in his New Jersey hospital room where Dylan internalized Guthrie’s speech patterns and movements. When Dylan met Joan Baez in 1961, she became one of his biggest supporters, recording his songs and bringing him on stage to sing with her. A recording contract with Columbia Records led to the John Ham- mond–produced first album, Bob Dylan (1962). Dylan initially made his mark as a writer of protest songs but quickly moved on to successfully experiment with poetic lyrics unparalleled among contemporary songwriters of the 1960s. Defying stylistic trends, three-minute song length limits, and simplistic rhymes, Dylan set a standard for musical and artistic freedom that influenced generations of musicians. With each successive album, Dylan moved into fresh territory, exploring psychedelia (Blonde on Blonde, 1966), country ( John Wesley Harding, 1968, and Nashville Skyline, 1969), rock and roll (Blood on the Tracks, 1975), and religion (Slow Train Coming, 1979). Of Jewish parentage, Dylan became a born-again Christian one year after the dissolution of his eleven-year marriage to Sara Lownds in 1977, but returned to his Jewish roots by 1983.

Rarely has Dylan given straight answers to interviewers’ questions. Literary influences on his songwriting can be garnered from examining his lyrics and from interviews with close friends. The books of John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie

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played pivotal roles in the development of his “Bob Dylan” persona. Early 1960s girlfriend Suze Rotolo and Dylan read a lot of poetry together, particularly Lord Byron and Arthur Rimbaud, and the playwright Bertolt Brecht (Hadju 2001, 108). He absorbed the ideas, style, and content of Beat poets Kenneth Patchen and Allen Ginsberg, who in turn acknowledged Dylan as an influence on his own later work. Michael Gray devotes a chapter in Song & Dance Man III to Dylan and the literary tradition, and throughout the book meticulously examines Dylan’s lyrics for British and American literary influences, particularly Robert Browning, T. S. Eliot, John Donne, D. H. Lawrence, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, W. H. Auden, William Burroughs, Franz Kafka, and Charles Baudelaire. Gray defines the central theme of Dylan’s entire output as the quest for salvation. A primary source for lyrics and inspiration, consistently recurring since his first album, is the Bible and biblical themes.

Archives

Department of Special Collections, Library, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. Correspondence with, 1970–89, and interview by Allen Ginsberg, 1977.

Experience Music Project, Seattle, Wash. Robert Shelton Collection.

Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minn. Dennis Anderson’s scholarly Bob Dylan research collection.

Printed Sources

Dylan, Bob. Lyrics 1962–1985 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

Gray, Michael. Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (London and New York: Cassell, 2000).

Hadju, David. Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).

Mellers, Wilfrid. A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Scaduto, Anthony. Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971). Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (New York: William

Morrow/Beech Tree Books, 1986).

Susan Hamburger

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