Dictionary of Literary Influences

E

EARHART, AMELIA (1897–1937)

Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas. Because of her father’s alcoholism, the family was forced to move repeatedly and she consequently attended six different high schools. In 1916, she enrolled in Ogontz School, a small college outside Philadelphia, but dropped out to tend to military veterans suffering in the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918. Shortly thereafter, she enrolled in Columbia University as a medical student, but later quit because she could not afford tuition. She fell in love with aviation in 1920 after her first plane ride. A female pioneer in the field, she set numerous flying records and promoted airplanes as a safe form of transportation. Perhaps the best-known female pilot of the twentieth century, she served as a role model for women who seek professions beyond those traditionally prescribed for them by society. Her legacy continues today because of the mysterious manner in which she died: she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean during an attempt to fly around the world in 1937.

Books were an important influence on Earhart’s childhood. Before her father’s alcoholism emerged, the family celebrated literature in the household. In The Fun of It, her autobiography, Earhart writes, “I was exceedingly fond of reading” and “Books have meant much to me. Not only did I myself read considerably, but Mother read aloud to my sister and me, early and late (Earhart 1932, 6). Each Sunday evening, both of her parents would read from the Bible or John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. She fondly recalls her father Edwin’s humorous interpretation of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and how “he could define the hardest words as well as the dictionary” (Earhart 1932, 6–7). She and her sister, Muriel, would also read aloud while doing household chores such as washing or dusting. Amelia often recited excerpts from “Horatius at the Bridge,” Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, and Robert Browning’s “That Toccato of Gallupis” (Putnam 1939, 26; Earhart 1932, 6–7). She loved poetry. Her husband, George Palmer Putnam, offers an example of Amelia’s tastes in Soaring Wings as Amelia lauds Vachel Lindsay’s whim-

151

Earhart, Amelia

sical poem, “The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken of Dancing” (Putnam 1939, 16). At her grandparents’ home, the sisters also took advantage of the family library, which was stocked with works by Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Thackeray as well as magazines such as Youth’s Companion, Harper’s Weekly, and Puck (Earhart 1932, 6). Her father even bought a complete set of Rudyard Kipling on the installment plan (Morrissey 1963). Given that the family was never far from bankruptcy, Edwin’s purchase of the collection shows the value the Earharts placed on literature.

Books offered Amelia courage and solace as her father’s drinking problem grew. “Where before he loved to hear the girls quote poetry,” explains biographer Carol Pearce, “now he wasn’t interested” (Pearce 1988, 35). Because Amelia’s father was not able to make any payments on the Kipling texts, her mother paid for the books by scrounging money from a meager household budget (Pearce 1988, 13). On one occasion, Amelia recited “Horatius at the Bridge” to her father when he nearly struck her for pouring a bottle of whisky down the drain (Pearce 1988, 18). Shortly thereafter, Edwin disappointed the family again one night when he was supposed to return home to take the sisters to see a performance of Twelfth Night at church. When he didn’t show up because of his drinking, Muriel sobbed all evening while Amelia “read herself to sleep” (Rich 1989, 10–11).

Biographies illustrate Amelia’s burgeoning assertiveness that would, later in life, allow her to engage in activities precluded to women. During Amelia’s senior year at a Chicago high school, an incompetent, deaf English teacher outraged Amelia, who circulated a petition among the students demanding a more responsible instructor; as a compromise, the school allowed her to spend her English period in the library, where she read “about four times the required number of books” (Goldstein and Dillon 1997, 20; for another account, also see Rich 1989, 12). Amelia demonstrated a similar crusade while attending Ogontz, where the headmistress, Abby Sutherland, assigned Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Amelia asked to read Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, but Sutherland denied the request because such controversial subject matter was unsuitable for young women (Morrissey 1963, 99). On another occasion, Amelia flustered Sutherland by asking her, during a formal meal with multiple guests, to explain the meaning of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (Rich 1989, 17). In fact, the teachers at Ogontz were later surprised when Amelia failed to pursue a career in literature, given the fact that her room was “filled with books, which she avidly perused during the day and half the night” (Pearce 1988, 23). Eventually, Earhart did pursue such a career in part by writing her memoirs, 20 Hours and 40 Minutes (1928), The Fun of It (1932), and Last Flight (published posthumously by her husband in 1937).

Archives

“Records Relating to Amelia Earhart,” U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center, Washington D.C., www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq3-2.htm.

“Amelia Earhart,” FBI Declassified Documents, FBI Documents Released Under the Freedom of Information Act, Washington D.C., www.foia.fbi.gov/earhart.htm. Records contain correspondence by individuals speculating about her death.

“Earhart, Amelia and Amy Otis,” Vol. 9, The Manuscript Inventories, Catalogs of Manuscripts, Books and Photographs, Radcliffe College Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Cambridge.

152

Eco, Umberto

Purdue University Library, West Lafayette, Indiana. Collection organized around historic flights.

National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. “AE Memorabilia,” International Women’s Air and Space Museum, Centerville, Ohio.

The Ninety-Nines, International Women’s Pilots Organization, Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City, Okla.

Printed Sources

Butler, Susan. East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1998).

Earhart, Amelia. The Fun of It (New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1932).

Goldstein, Donald M., and Katherine V. Dillon. Amelia: The Life of the Aviation Legend (Washington: Brassey Inc., 1997).

Lovell, Mary S. The Sound of Wings (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). This text addresses the relationship between Amelia and her husband, George Palmer Putnam.

Morrissey, Muriel. Courage Is the Price (Kansas: McCormick–Armstrong, 1963). Written by Amelia’s sister, this book focuses on family relationships.

Morrissey, Muriel, and Carol L. Osborne. Amelia, My Courageous Sister (Santa Clara: Osborne Publisher, 1987).

Pearce, Carol A. Amelia Earhart (New York: Facts on File, 1988).

Putnam, George Palmer. Soaring Wings (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939). The account of Earhart’s husband.

———. Wide Margins. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1942).

Rich, Doris. Amelia Earhart: A Biography (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).

Ware, Susan. Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Feminism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).

Rosemary King

ECO, UMBERTO (1932– )

Umberto Eco, Italian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist, was born and educated in Alessandria. Eco graduated with a degree in philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954, where he began to lecture in aesthetics (1961–64). After holding academic positions in Florence (1966–69) and Milan (1969–71), he taught semiotics at the University of Bologna, where he remains as a professor, in conjunction with appointments and honorary degrees at universities worldwide. Eco’s theoretical contribution—dozens of books, among which are A Theory of Semiotics

(1976), The Role of the Reader (1979), and The Limits of Interpretation (1990)—goes hand in hand with a creative production culminating with the novels The Name of the Rose (1980; tr. 1983), Foucault’s Pendulum (1988; tr. 1989), The Island of the Day Before (1994; tr. 1995), and Baudolino (2000).

As an adolescent, Eco manifested a passion for reading and a gift for parodic writing. His ironic and desecrating attitude coexists with a serious cultural commitment. Attracted to the poetry of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Ungaretti, Quasimodo, and especially Montale during high school, he later turned to medieval philosophy and wrote a dissertation on Thomas Aquinas. Eco reads Aquinas’s aesthetics as the prefiguration of methodological and rhetorical principles that reemerge in the modern world, from the modernist poetics of James Joyce—one of his favorite authors—to New Criticism and the multimedia theories of Marshall

153

Eco, Umberto

McLuhan. This eclectic connection between diverse cultural forms as medieval allegorism and the contemporary avant-garde is the pivot of The Open Work (1962; tr. 1989), the book that earned Eco a European reputation for its reconceptualization of the structure of the work of art as “chaosmos” (Eco 1989, 41), a polyvalent, open, but not undefined aesthetic order.

Eco’s interest in the form of avant-garde art as a field of possibilities is also sparked by experimental artists like musician Luciano Berio, with whom Eco collaborated at the Italian National Broadcasting Company (RAI) as the person responsible for television cultural programs (1954–58), and writer Edoardo Sanguineti, a leading member of the neo-avant-garde movement “Gruppo 63,” which Eco joined in 1963. This intellectual and creative experience consolidated Eco’s notion of the open work as an antiauthoritarian and innovative construction rather than as a stable, content-oriented cognitive model. Hence, it paved the ground for Eco’s subsequent studies in reception theory and mass communication and also anticipated the erosion of differences between elitist and popular forms of culture, crucial to Eco’s shift toward semiotics in the 1970s.

Rejecting Ferdinand De Saussure’s ontological idea of structure and endorsing Charles Peirce’s notion of unlimited semiosis, according to which signs refer to other signs and not to objective referents or universal ideas, Eco now treats the totality of culture as “a system of systems of signification” (Eco 1976, 28). Yet signs and their codes are for Eco sociohistorical creations to be interpreted through an inferential process requiring contextual validation.

The coexistence of a theoretical and a pragmatic approach to communication, the dialogue between past and present, and the blend of high and low culture persist in Eco’s novelistic activity. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones as well as by John Barth’s postmodern notions of literary exhaustion and replenishment, The Name of the Rose revives Eco’s medieval erudition together with his enduring passion for the popular genre of detective fiction, with the aim of a narrative renewal based upon an ironic quotation of literary tradition. The openness of Eco’s exploration of a textual world leading back to other books rather than to a referential reality is reasserted in The Island of the Day Before, whereas Foucault’s Pendulum, recalling Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional universe as much as Michel Foucault’s notion of decenteredness, adopts the detective story to denounce overinterpretation, the danger of the reader’s excessive heuristic freedom in his endless quest for meaning.

Archives

No archival sources yet available.

Eco’s curriculum vitae: http://www.dsc.unibo.it/dipartimento/people/eco/CURRICUL.htm.

Printed Sources

Bondanella, Peter. Umberto Eco and the Open Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Capozzi, Rocco (ed.). Reading Eco. An Antholog y (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

Eco, Umberto. The Open Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

———. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). Ganeri, Margherita. Il caso Eco (Palermo: Palumbo, 1991).

Nicoletta Pireddu

154

Eden, Robert Anthony

EDEN, ROBERT ANTHONY (1897–1977)

Anthony Eden was born in County Durham, England. The scion of an aristocratic family, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and entered Parliament as a Conservative just five years after surviving the First World War. A foreign policy expert, Eden rose to the rank of foreign secretary in 1935, but in 1938 he resigned in protest against Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement toward Germany and Italy. Thereafter, Eden aligned himself with Winston Churchill and spent many years as Churchill’s chief lieutenant. Eden became prime minister in 1955, but resigned in disgrace a few months after the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Britain and France attempted to take control of the Suez Canal from Egypt by force, ultimately withdrawing under United States economic pressure. Eden’s reputation as prime minister gets reexamined with every new wave of Arab militancy. However, attempts to rehabilitate him are limited by the fact that his government secretly endorsed an Israeli invasion of Egypt in order to create a pretext for seizing the canal, a matter about which Eden lied to Parliament.

At Eton, Eden had a particular interest in foreign languages. “I preferred Greek to Latin and French to either,” he later wrote (Eden 1977, 45). At Oxford, he took a first class degree in oriental languages, specializing in Persian and Arabic, and serving as president of the university’s Asiatic Society. Some writers have seen a connection between Eden’s interest in other languages and cultures and his later specialization in foreign policy issues, and his Oxford tutor in Persian predicted (correctly) that Eden would be foreign secretary before he turned 40 (Rhodes James 1986, 60). Though he professed not to have been too interested in politics until his twenties, that subject accounted for a large quantity of his early reading. While in his teens he studied parliamentary debates and elections so closely that on train trips he could name the MP of each town passed, along with statistics from the constituency’s last election (Rhodes James 1986, 26). Lord Curzon’s writings on foreign policy likewise prodded him to choose a political career (Rhodes James 1986, 62). However, Eden’s experience as an infantry officer during the war had a larger impact on him than any of his studies, and he did not attend Oxford until after the armistice. He saw frontline action during the war and lost many friends and also a brother in the navy. His strong support for the League of Nations and the United Nations was an obvious consequence of his wartime experience. In that light, Eden’s maverick military action at Suez is all the more puzzling, despite the parallels he tried to draw between Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and the fascist dictators of the 1930s.

Archives

Avon Papers, Special Collections, University of Birmingham Library.

Public Record Office, Kew, London (site of Eden’s Foreign Office Papers).

Printed Sources

Eden, Robert Anthony. Another World (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1977).

———.Facing the Dictators (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

———.Full Circle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960).

———.The Reckoning (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).

Rhodes James, Robert. Anthony Eden (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986).

Christopher Pepus

155

Einaudi, Luigi

EINAUDI, LUIGI (1874–1961)

Luigi Einaudi, born in Carrù, Piedmont, was an economist, statesman, and journalist. From 1902 he was professor of public finance at the University of Turin, and in 1908 he became managing editor of Riforma sociale. In 1919 he became a lifelong Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. An opponent of Fascism, in 1935 he was forced to stop editing Riforma sociale. An exile in Switzerland in 1943, he mediated the case for a European federation. In 1945 he was appointed governor of the Bank of Italy. In 1946 he was elected as Liberal deputy at the Assemblea Costituente, and he played a part in writing many articles of the new Italian constitution. In 1947 he became budget minister in the fourth Alcide de Gasperi cabinet and successfully “rescued” the Italian lira from inflation. In 1948, he was elected president of the republic.

Einaudi’s literary work as a professional economist and journalist is enormous. His bibliography amounts to more than 3,800 items, and his articles appeared in more than 150 different Italian and foreign periodicals. He contributed almost 300 articles dealing with the economic and financial situation of Italy during the interwar years to the Economist (London). As a specialist in public finance, his favorite topic was the trade-off between equity and efficiency of taxation. In 1912 he started from the phenomenon of the so-called double taxation of saving, already stated by John Stuart Mill, in order to advocate a tax system levied on non-necessary consumption; in 1929 he discussed the properties of the “optimal” tax—that is, one that does not disturb the economic equilibrium. The evolution of his thought in financial matters shows a shift from a partial equilibrium approach à la Marshall to a general equilibrium approach à la Walras.

As a political thinker, he was much influenced by the Smith-Burke tradition, and considered the individual liberty from the state as the main feature of freedom. He was one of the founders of the libertarian Mont Pelerin Society, and praised F. A. von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. In fact, both Hayek and Einaudi considered collectivism as the most serious menace to Western civilization. Moreover, he was in correspondence with the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and the German economist Wilhelm Roepke, who were concerned with the negative features of modern industrialism and mass civilization. On the other hand, he learned the lesson of John Stuart Mill (whose book On Liberty he prefaced in 1925) in the sense of a more democratic and “popular” liberalism. Therefore, he accepted the idea of some relevant public tasks (mainly in education) in order to allow for everybody “the equality of the starting-points.”

Einaudi’s laissez-faire libertarianism was very different from J. M. Keynes’s attitude toward an active role of the state in economic policy. He did not approve of the “Keynes plan” (1933) as a remedy to depression and unemployment. The Keynesian investment-saving sequence via the multiplier was rejected by Einaudi in favor of the reverse traditional sequence going from private saving and accumulation to investment. In the monetary field, he rejected Keynes’s “liquidity preference” concept and reaffirmed the everlasting validity of the quantity theory of money, considering the transaction motive for keeping money as the rule. Finally, he discussed with the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) the relationship between political liberalism and economic libertarianism. While Croce identified liberalism with the “religion of liberty” in some metaphysical sense quite independently from historical circumstances, Einaudi pointed out that if one gives

156

Einstein, Albert

to liberalism no empirical content (i.e., a certain amount of laissez-faire and free enterprise), the result would be an empty abstraction.

Archives

Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Torino, Carte di Luigi Einaudi.

Printed Sources

Caffè, F. “Luigi Einaudi.” In The New Palgrave, 4 vols. (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).

Einaudi, Luigi. Cronache economiche e politiche di un trentennio (1893–1925), 8 vols. (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1959–65).

———.“From Our Italian Correspondent”: Luigi Einaudi’s Articles in the Economist, 1908–1946,

R. Marchionatti (ed.), (Florence: Olschki, 2000).

———.Prediche inutili (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1964).

———.Saggi sul risparmio e l’imposta (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1941).

———, and B. Croce, Liberismo e liberalismo, 2nd ed. (Milan-Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1957). Faucci, Riccardo. Luigi Einaudi (Turin: Unione tipogafico-editrice torinese, 1986). Robbins, Lionel, Steven G. Medema, and Warren J. Samuels. A History of Economic Thought.

The LSE Lectures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

Schumpeter, J. A., and Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter. History of Economic Analysis [1954] (London: Routledge, 1997).

Ricardo Faucci

EINSTEIN, ALBERT (1879–1955)

Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany, the eldest child of Jewish middle-class merchants. He attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich from 1884 to 1889 and then the Luitpold Gymnasium, where he studied until 1894, at which time he left school to join his parents, who had moved to Milan, Italy. He finished his final year of secondary education at a cantonal school in Aarau, Switzerland, from which he graduated in 1896. He then traveled to Zurich to begin his studies at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), receiving his diploma in 1900. Einstein held numerous teaching positions through the course of his life, including tenures at the German University in Prague, the ETH, the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and visiting professorships at Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

From an early age, Einstein exhibited a resistance to formal methods of education that relied on fear, force, and artificial authority. Such an approach, in his view, weakened “that divine curiosity which every healthy child possesses” (Einstein 1950, 33). Einstein’s childhood curiosity led him to pursue his own course of studies outside of the classroom. Under the tutelage of Max Talmud, a young medical student who dined weekly with his family, he read Aaron Bernstein’s Naturwissenschaftliche Volksbücher (Popular Books on Physical Science), Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter), and Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), as well as texts on geometry and advanced mathematics. In addition to his scientific and philosophical studies, Einstein also developed a passionate and abiding interest in literature, including the works of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (particularly The Brothers Karamazov).

In 1905, which later became known as Einstein’s annus mirabilis, or “miraculous year,” he worked in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland. There, as he later

157

Einstein, Albert

described it, he thought: “If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight. I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.” This vision gave birth to his special theory of relativity and later would form the basis of general relativity. Others had addressed the issue of relativity prior to Einstein, including Hendrik Antoon Lorenz and Jules Henri Poincaré. However, Einstein’s special theory, published in 1905 in the journal Annalen der Physik, was revolutionary in its approach. He also published two other papers in 1905: one on Brownian motion that confirmed the atomic theory of matter, and one on the photo-electric effect that resolved difficulties in Max Planck’s quantum theory. These works stunned the scientific community, but their enormous significance was yet to be fully demonstrated.

Like Isaac Newton before him, who invented calculus to provide a mathematical description of gravity, Einstein needed a similar mathematical tool to describe his general theory of relativity. He found it with the help of Georg Pick, a mathematician at the German University in Prague, who introduced him to the works of Italian mathematicians Gregorio Ricci and Tullio Levi-Cività. Einstein then teamed up with his oldest friend, Marcel Grossman, a mathematics professor at the ETH, who recommended the works of Bernhard Riemann, a pioneering nineteenthcentury mathematician specializing in the geometry of curved space. Einstein completed his general theory of relativity in 1916, and its subsequent verification during an eclipse in 1919 created an entirely new understanding of gravitation and made him an international celebrity. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921 for his work on the photo-electric effect.

In 1950, Einstein published a collection of essays titled Out of My Later Years in which he recorded his thoughts on science, education, politics, and religion. He was deeply influenced by H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History, which emphasized an educational system that promotes the progress of global civilization as opposed to national dominance. Having witnessed the horrors of two world wars, both of which he saw as having been driven by a perverse and oppressive nationalism, he advocated an international governing body, similar to the League of Nations, but which could enforce its decisions with military force if needed. He cited Lord Davies’s Force as “an excellent expression of this conviction” (Einstein 1950, 209). Einstein’s support for the development of atomic weapons in 1939 undercut his own political views against the use of science for military purposes. That he never envisioned the use of these weapons, however, is evident in his later writings. Peace among nations and the preservation of freedom for all people was, in his view, the goal of science. “Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur and no Lister” (Einstein 1950, 149).

Archives

Albert Einstein Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; houses the literary estate of Albert Einstein.

Einstein Papers Project, California Institute of Technology; joint project with Princeton University Press to publish The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein in 25 volumes, comprising scientific, professional, and personal papers, manuscripts, and correspondence.

Printed Sources

Einstein, Albert. Out of My Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950).

———. The World as I See It (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1991).

158

Eisenhower, Dwight David

Highfield, Roger, and Paul Carter. The Private Lives of Albert Einstein (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).

Jammer, Max. Einstein and Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). White, Michael, and John Gribbin. Einstein: A Life in Science (New York: Dutton, 1993).

Philip Bader

EISENHOWER, DWIGHT DAVID (1890–1969)

Dwight Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas, to a devout Christian family with Mennonite roots. In 1891 they moved to Abilene, Kansas, where Eisenhower graduated from high school in 1909. His early years involved family Bible reading and memorization; in addition, he read John Bunyan’s Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress several times (Tobin 1966, 32). He also loved reading ancient history. In his 1967 memoir, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, Eisenhower recalls that his childhood hero was the Roman leader Hannibal.

After two years as a creamery refrigeration engineer, Eisenhower received an appointment to West Point and earned a commission as an infantry officer in 1915, graduating 61 of 164. Eisenhower wanted to lead soldiers into battle during World War I but instead ran training camps and coached football—work he excelled at. While in the Tank Corps at Fort Meade, Maryland (1919–22), George S. Patton introduced Eisenhower to General Fox Conner, who made him his aide in Panama (1922–24). Although West Point had made history an “out-and-out memory course” (Eisenhower 1967, 185), Conner rekindled Eisenhower’s interest by sharing his library. They discussed books during horseback rides together in Panama, starting with novels like The Crisis, an epic about the Civil War by the American novelist Winston Churchill. They read Plato, Cicero, Tacitus, the Federalist Papers, and even Nietzsche—which Eisenhower admittedly quit halfway through (Tobin 1966, 32). He also read Civil War memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant, another general who later became President. Grant’s plain style would serve as a model for Eisenhower’s own writing (Perret 1999, 379).

Conner’s sponsorship combined with Eisenhower’s grasp of military strategy and writing ability propelled him to staff assignments in Washington, D.C. (1927–35) and with General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines (1935–39). Eisenhower’s favorable impression on high-level commanders culminated in his rapid ascension from lieutenant colonel (1941) to five-star general by the end of World War II (1944–45). Under the direction of Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, Eisenhower led Allied campaigns in North Africa and Italy (1942–43) and the Normandy Invasion in June 1944—operations requiring collaboration with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Free French leader Charles de Gaulle. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Eisenhower brought an end to World War II in May 1945. He succeeded Marshall as chief of staff (1945–48) before retiring to become president of Columbia University (1948–50). As the cold war intensified, President Harry S. Truman recalled Eisenhower to duty as NATO commander (1950–52). Eisenhower, who since World War II had resisted pressure to run for president, in 1952 ran successfully and served two terms (1953–61). In 1961 Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, retired to a farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he painted, wrote, and continued to be consulted on national security matters until his death in 1969.

159