Dictionary of Literary Influences

Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhaylovich

Among the most influential works Eisenhower read while under General Conner’s mentorship was On War by nineteenth-century Prussian soldier-philosopher Karl von Clausewitz, who described war as a “continuation of political intercourse with an admixture of other means” (quoted in Pickett 1985, 23). The horrors of war Eisenhower had witnessed in World War II led him to avoid those “other means” once he gained political power: he ended fighting in Korea quickly and countered Soviet advances and other Cold War threats peacefully—despite his advisors’ recommending otherwise several times (Ambrose 1983–84, 2:626); Eisenhower said he drew inspiration from poet Robert Frost, who dedicated this line of poetry to him: “The strong are saying nothing until they see” (quoted in Eisenhower 1967, 168).

Eisenhower Library archivist Barbara Constable summarizes White House responses to inquiries about Eisenhower’s favorite reading: “The Bible—because of his early training by deeply religious parents; [Mark Twain’s] Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—because it is a wonderful satire; Shakespeare—because of the author’s penetrating thought on an infinite variety of subjects.” In a 1940 letter, Eisenhower responded to his son John’s suggestion that man is just chemicals by appealing to literature: “The plays of Shakespeare, the Bible, the Gettysburg Address and [Thomas] Gray’s Elegy are not merely mixtures of natural elements” (Eisenhower 1998, 465).

Archives

Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas: Personal and official papers, books from the Eisenhower family home.

Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: Personal belongings including books.

Printed Sources

Ambrose, Stephen E. Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect (vol. 1); The President (vol. 2), (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983–84). The definitive biography.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967). Chapters III and XIII discuss Eisenhower’s reading.

———. The Prewar Diaries and Selected Papers, Daniel D. Holt and James W. Leyerzapf (eds.), (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

Lee, R. Alton (comp.). Eisenhower: A Bibliography of His Times and Presidency (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1991). Comprehensive bibliography dealing with Eisenhower and his cultural surroundings.

Perret, Geoffrey. Eisenhower (New York: Random House, 1999). Tracks the importance of reading throughout Eisenhower’s life.

Pickett, William. “Eisenhower as a Student of Clausewitz,” Military Review 65, 7 ( July 1985), 21–27.

Tobin, Richard. “Dwight D. Eisenhower: ‘What I Have Learned’,” Saturday Review Sept. 10, 1966, 29–34.

Stephen J. Rippon

EISENSTEIN, SERGEI MIKHAYLOVICH (1898–1948)

Sergei Eisenstein was born in Riga, Latvia, and became the most noted filmmaker of the Soviet Communist regime as well as one of the most instrumental filmmakers in the history of movies. Eisenstein moved to St. Petersburg in the

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1910s and trained as an architect and engineer at the Institute of Civil Engineering. He witnessed the 1917 October Revolution and volunteered for the Red Army in 1918, serving as a construction and defense engineer and producing troop entertainment. Later, he joined the First Worker’s Theatre of Proletcult in Moscow, working as the assistant stage designer and codirector. Convinced that he could translate his political agenda to the movie screen after being drawn toward film with an appreciation of D.W. Griffith’s work, Eisenstein’s first cinema work was a 1923 newsreel parody titled Glumov’s Diary. In 1924 he directed his first film, Strike, and published his first article on the theories of montage editing in the review Lef, in which he proposed that the effect and statements of a movie are made through visuals rather than dialogue. He also employed the technique of “typeage”—to cast nonprofessionals in leading roles. Despite his pioneering ideas, Eisenstein only completed seven films, most done under the intrusion of the communist system so they could not escape criticisms of serving as propaganda vehicles. Eisenstein’s other movies include The Battleship Potemkin, October (Ten Days That Shook the World), Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible. Voted by Sight and Sound in 1958 as the greatest movie ever made, The Battleship Potemkin (1925) was filmed in the Black Sea port of Odessa to commemorate the Revolution of 1905 and brought Eisenstein world fame. Banned in several countries, Potemkin contains his most famous montage editing sequence, the massacre on the Odessa steps, which was so realistic viewers believed they were watching newsreel footage and clashed with police outside the USSR. Eisenstein started the 1930s with a trip to Europe and the United States to research the techniques of employing sound with film. He was hailed as a hero and became friends with people as diverse as Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, D.W. Griffith, and Upton Sinclair, among others. Sinclair helped Eisenstein with financial assistance to shoot his only American film, Que Viva Mexico!, but under Josef Stalin’s orders, who feared Eisenstein’s defection, Russian government officials intercepted it to be edited later by others. During his trip, Eisenstein witnessed several cultural and political differences that would help lead to a nervous breakdown because he could not settle into Soviet hopes for a Stalinist Hollywood in the USSR. In 1935, an All-Union Conference of Cinema Workers even vilified him. He became a devoted teacher and scholar after taking the head of the Direction Department at the Moscow film school in 1932. After Potemkin, Eisenstein’s most popular work was probably Alexander Nevsky (1938), a monumental costume epic and attack on Nazi Germany, as well as an international success that won him the Order of Lenin. Yet, it was pulled from distribution after the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact. During World War II, Eisenstein started Ivan the Terrible, his last major work of the cinema. While Stalin admired the sixteenth-century Ivan IV, after the release of the first part in 1943, the Soviet Film Trust withheld the second part until 1958 because Stalin believed the movie was a mask of Eisenstein’s attitudes toward him as a bloodthirsty tyrant. While Stalin allowed him to start work on the third part for some reason, Eisenstein died of a heart attack in 1948 before its conclusion.

During his career, several literary sources influenced Eisenstein. As the leading figure of Soviet film, one of Eisenstein’s goals for montage editing was to represent Karl Marx’s dialectic and to utilize cinematic techniques for the common man. Yet, Eisenstein also expanded filmmaking by including influences beyond the Soviet machinery. While in the military, Eisenstein studied theater, philosophy, psychol-

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ogy, and linguistics, and staged and performed in several productions for which he designed sets and costumes. He was also interested in Richard Wagner’s work and drew on his interest in Japanese Kabuki theater and Noh drama and their use of masks, making Ivan the Terrible’s gestures, sound, costumes, sets, and colors into one powerful, synthetic experience. The use of these art forms was completely consistent with Eisenstein as a modernist who did not want to separate cinema from other art forms, but place it within the context of those forms. His modernist focus can be traced to influences from his early study as an architect and engineer when he came into contact with the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. Da Vinci’s work influenced Eisenstein with Renaissance conceptions of space, later interpreted for their psychological impact by Freud. Based on Freud’s interpretations, Eisenstein believed he could use the technology of film to distort space and get machine-age sensations into the style of the Renaissance, translating those sensations into Marxist humanism to serve Communist propaganda. During his later trip West, he became good friends with many modernist writers and architects, including James Joyce, Abel Gance, Le Corbusier, and Gertrude Stein, who all encouraged his ideas of how to use the cinema.

Archives

The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Library, New York: stills and archival material.

Printed Sources

Bergan, Ronald. Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict (London: Little, Brown, and Co., 1997). Bordwell, David. The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1993).

Christie, Ian, and Richard Taylor (eds.). Eisenstein Rediscovered (New York: Routledge, 1993). Goodwin, James. Eisenstein, Cinema, and History (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press,

1993).

Christopher C. Strangeman

ELIOT, THOMAS STEARNS (1888–1965)

T. S. Eliot was born into a prosperous Unitarian home in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of seven children. He spent his summers at the family home in Worcester, Massachusetts. He would later use images of the sea in his poems, while also retaining the influence of his “Southern” upbringing.

Eliot was educated at Smith Academy, which had been founded by his grandfather, and Harvard University (B.A., 1906–10). As a master’s and Ph.D. philosophy student at Harvard, he attended Oxford University in 1914 and remained in England for the rest of his life. He completed his dissertation but never received the Ph.D., and after marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1915, he went to work for Lloyd’s Bank in London, where he remained for eight years. He rose through the ranks while writing poetry and criticism at night. The pressure of this schedule and his wife’s mental illness wore on him; he spent two months in a Swiss sanatorium in 1921. Eliot separated from Haigh-Wood in 1933; she died in 1947. He married Valerie Fletcher in 1957.

While still at Lloyd’s Bank, Eliot was assistant editor of the Egoist (1917–19). He founded the Criterion in 1922 and remained its editor until 1939. Eliot used the Criterion to publish his own poems, including his most famous poem, The Waste

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Land, in the fall of 1922. In 1925, he began working for Faber and Faber publishers, where he remained until his death. Eliot’s writing career comprised poetry, criticism, and drama. His greatest poems are considered “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1920), The Waste Land, and The Four Quartets (1935–42). It has been said that he invented modern poetry in English (Bergonzi 1972, 11). Eliot’s criticism appeared in such works as The Sacred Wood (1920), Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (1932), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), and Notes towards a Definition of Culture (1948). His plays include Murder in the Cathedral

(1935), The Family Reunion (1939), and The Cocktail Party (1950). As one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century, Eliot received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. He died in London in 1965, having been made a British subject in 1927.

As a child, Eliot enjoyed the poems of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Wolfe, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. At 14, he read The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam; two years later his first published poem appeared in the Smith Academy Record. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Eliot composed four of his most important poems: “Portrait of a Lady,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Preludes,” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” They were influenced by Dante’s Divine Comedy, first read in 1910, as well as the metaphysical poets, the Jacobean dramatists, and the French symbolists. Of this last group, Eliot was particularly attracted to Jules Laforgue. Laforgue, Eliot said, was “one of those which have affected the course of my life.” Laforgue’s influence on Eliot continued until 1912 but in the end was less profound than that of Dante and Charles Baudelaire (Bergonzi 1972, 9). Dante’s poetry was “the most persistent and deepest influence upon my own verse,” Eliot wrote in his essay “What Dante Means to Me” (To Criticize the Critic, 1965). Throughout his works, Eliot echoes Dante’s forms, techniques, and subject mat- ter—from “Prufrock” to 1942’s “Little Gidding.”

The Waste Land, first published in 1922, exhibits Eliot’s most important influences. It is most of all a symbolist poem, full of suggestion and implication but little explanation. At the same time, its sharp visual images owe much to Dante. The subject of Eliot’s doctoral dissertation, philosopher F. H. Bradley, also contributes to the poem, in the feeling that time has no objective reality. How much of The Waste Land was also influenced by its editor, Ezra Pound, was not known until 1968, when Eliot’s original manuscript was discovered. Eliot did not accept all of Pound’s suggestions, but Pound’s editing did make The Waste Land into a single poem, rather than a group of separate poems.

Eliot’s graduate studies also brought much to bear on his poetry. For his doctoral studies in philosophy and Oriental studies, he read Sanskrit poetry and the BhagavadGita. He refers to the Bhagavad-Gita in “The Dry Salvages” (1941), and Sanskrit tags appear at the end of The Waste Land. Western religion was the subject of his later poems. While Eliot’s early poems dealt with the isolation and chaos of modern life, his later poems, like Ash Wednesday and the Four Quartets, showed his turn toward spiritual hope. In 1927, he had become a member of the Anglican Church.

Archives

T.S. Eliot Collection, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England. Correspondence, literary manuscripts, and papers.

T.S. Eliot Collection, Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Mass. Correspondence, literary manuscripts, and papers.

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T.S. Eliot Collection, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. Correspondence, literary manuscripts, and papers.

Printed Sources

Bergonzi, Bernard. T. S. Eliot (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972).

D’Ambrosio, Vinnie-Marie. Eliot Possessed: T. S. Eliot and FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát (New York: New York University Press, 1989).

Eble, Kenneth (ed.). T. S. Eliot (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982).

Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1888–1965 (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988).

Eliot, T. S. T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1971).

Mackinnon, Lachlan. Eliot, Auden, Lowell: Aspects of the Baudelairean Inheritance (London: Macmillan, 1983).

Manganiello, Dominic. T. S. Eliot and Dante (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).

Melissa Stallings

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FANON, FRANTZ (1925–1961)

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique, French West Indies. He attended lycée in Fort-de-France, Martinique (1939–43), studying with Aimé Césaire, but quit to join the Free French in World War II (1943–45), earning the Croix de Guerre. In 1946 he reentered the lycée and helped Césaire campaign for mayor of Fort-de- France. Fanon studied dentistry (University of Paris, 1947), then switched to psychiatry (University of Lyon), defending his thesis in 1951. His 1952 marriage to Josie Dublé, a white woman, was controversial. Fanon practiced psychiatry at the Hospital of Saint-Ylie (1952), then did residency at the Hospital of Saint-Alban under Dr. François Tosquelles, who strongly influenced Fanon’s psychiatric practice. In 1953 Fanon worked at Pontseron, Normandy/Brittany, then moved to Algeria as chef de service of the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital, introducing treatment methods inspired by his residency. He became involved with the Front de liberation nationale (FLN) in its fight for Algerian liberation. In 1957, Fanon was expelled from Algeria for political reasons. Moving to Tunisia, he served the FLN as a propagandist, spokesperson, and diplomat, and wrote for El Moudjahid, taught at the University of Tunis, and practiced psychiatry. Surviving several assassination attempts in 1959, he became a representative of the provisional Algerian government in 1960. That year he was diagnosed with leukemia. In 1961 Fanon sought a position in Cuba, his model of a successful revolution. He died undergoing leukemia treatments in Bethesda, Maryland.

Many forces influenced Fanon. Aimé Césaire, his teacher and intellectual mentor, introduced him to the ideology of the négritude movement, inspiring his quest to discover his authentic self and recognize the beauty of being black. Fanon quotes Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in Peau noire masques blancs. Jean-Paul Sartre influenced Fanon’s consciousness of race prejudice and of how the other shapes identity. Fanon read Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, Being and Nothingness, and

Orphée noir, originally an introduction to a négritude poetry anthology. When

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defining his identity under the concept of négritude in Peau noire masques blancs, Fanon discusses Sartre’s views regarding the situation of Jews and blacks, criticizing Sartre’s evaluation of négritude as a passing phase but finally agreeing with it. The two met in 1961 to arrange Sartre’s writing of the preface to Les damnés de la terre. Fanon’s analysis of violence in Les damnés de la terre derives from Hegel via Sartre. Fanon also read Leon Trotsky, V. I. Lenin, and Karl Marx. Peau noire masques blancs hints at universalist solutions for social and racial oppression reminiscent of Marxist philosophy. Direct structural parallels exist between Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Fanon’s L’An V de la révolution algerienne.

“Concerning Violence” in Les damnés de la terre parodies Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s “Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Ideology.” Psychiatric influences on Peau noire masques blancs include Alfred Adler’s Understanding Human Nature and The Nervous Character and Sigmund Freud. The “Lordship and Bondage” section of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenolog y of Spirit ( Jean Hyppolite, translator) underlies Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s master–slave relation (Peau noire masques blancs, chapter seven). Friedrich Nietzsche’s Superman (Thus Spake Zarathustra) impressed Fanon greatly, while Karl Jaspers shaped Fanon’s existentialist education. Other influences include the négritude periodical Présence africaine, Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, and Maurice MerleauPonty, Fanon’s teacher at Lyon.

Archives

Bibliothèque populaire Frantz Fanon, Riviere-Pilote, Martinique, French West Indies.

Printed Sources

Bulhan, Hussein Abdilahi. Frantz Fanon and the Psycholog y of Oppression (New York: Plenum Press, 1985).

Geismar, Peter. Fanon (New York: The Dial Press, 1971).

Gendzier, Irene L. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (New York: Pantheon, 1973).

Hansen, Emmanuel. Frantz Fanon: Social and Political Thought (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977).

Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography (London: Granta Books, 1998).

Guillemette Johnston

FASSBINDER, RAINER WERNER (1945–1982)

Born in Bad Wörishofen, not far from Munich, (West) Germany, on May 31, 1945, Rainer Werner Fassbinder often pretended he was born in 1946. From the age of 18, he wanted to be a filmmaker, and he determined to release 30 feature films before the age of 30. He succeeded, but had to cheat one year on his date of birth. After his parents divorced, young Fassbinder lived in Munich, mainly with his mother, who was a translator. He went to the Rudolf-Steiner elementary school between 1951 and 1955. From 1956 to 1961, Fassbinder went to several high schools in Munich and Augsburg. From 1963, he went to drama schools including the Jungen Akademie, in Munich, where he won in 1966 the third prize for his play titled Nur eine Scheibe Brot (Only a Slice of Bread). The same year, he was refused twice by the new Deutschen Film und Fernsehakademie in West Berlin, because of his “lack of talent.” Fassbinder directed his first short films and began working as an actor and director in a collective pseudo-avant-garde theater troupe in Munich

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in 1967, freely adapting classic plays by Henrik Ibsen (A Doll’s House) and August Strindberg (Miss Julie). His first 10 films (1969–71) were weak; but after discovering Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, his style changed into flamboyant melodramas, with a sense of Brechtian distance. He released his most famous films between 1972 and 1981: Fontane Effi Briest (1974), Fox and his Friends (1974), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981). Fassbinder also wrote plays and song lyrics (with composer Peer Raben) for actress Ingrid Caven. Rainer Werner Fassbinder died in Berlin on June 10, 1982, from a mixture of alcohol and pills. He was only 37. He had created some 40 films in just 13 years.

Fassbinder often said that Alfred Döblin’s book, Berlin Alexanderplatz, changed his life when he discovered it in his teenage years. In many of his first movies, there is a character named after Döblin’s hero, Franz Biberkopf, played by Fassbinder himself. When Fassbinder uses a pseudonym (as a film editor), he chooses “Franz Walsh,” mixing his double identification with Biberkopf and filmmaker Raoul Walsh. Fassbinder often wrote his own scripts and sometimes adapted famous novels into his best films: Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair, a novel written in the thirties, became one of Fassbinder’s masterpieces, Despair (1978), from a script written by Tom Stoppard; Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest inspired his posthumous Querelle (1982), a very sinister and baroque movie. Fassbinder also adapted his own plays

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Bremer Freiheit (1973). But his masterpiece is probably the 15-hour adaptation of Döblin’s famous book, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), which is in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest feature film in the history of cinema. The film’s epilogue explains how Döblin’s universe has shaped the filmmaker’s baroque imagery. Fassbinder also was a film buff; as a teenager, he went to see movies almost every day and admired French directors such as Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, and Robert Bresson. He also admired Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana (1961), Alexander Kluge, and Douglas Sirk. Fassbinder was fascinated by a book written in the sixties by a German female author (who committed suicide), Man of Jasmine, by Unica Zürn. Fassbinder was a constant reader who was receptive to all influences; when he read a German translation of Henri de Montherlant’s novel, Pitié pour les femmes, he created a female character who writes every day to the author she admires; that character is in Fassbinder’s provocative movie, Satan’s Brew (1976). The director read all kinds of magazines, from the leftist Spiegel to popular German sensation tabloids such as Konkret, that inspired melodramatic films such as I Only Want You to Love Me (1975) and Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven

(1975). He later adapted popular biographies: Lale Anderson’s autobiography, Der Himmel hat viele Farben, about a popular singer in Nazi Germany became the controversial Lili Marleen (1980); German actress Sybille Schmitz’s sad life inspired his most beautiful film, Veronika Voss (1982). Although he didn’t read many history books, Fassbinder’s movies could each tell a bit of Germany’s history in the twentieth century through many wonderful “portraits de femmes.”

Archives

The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, Berlin. Personal archives, manuscripts, correspondence, films, scripts.

Filmverlag der Autoren, Munich. Manuscripts, correspondence.

Deutsche Stiftung Kinemathek, Berlin. Manuscripts, costumes, correspondence, film scripts.

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Printed Sources

Elsaesser, Thomas. Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, Serie: Film culture in transition, 1996).

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, Michael Toteberg (ed.), Krishna R. Winston (trans.), (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

Lardeau, Yann. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Paris: Seuil, 1990).

Schmid, Marion, and Herbert Gehr (eds.). Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Dichter, Schauspieler, Filmemacher (Catalog) (Berlin: Argon, 1992).

Shattuc, Jane. Television, Tabloids, and Tears: Fassbinder and Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

Watson, Wallace Steadman. Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Film as Private and Public Art (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996).

Yves Laberge

FAULKNER, WILLIAM CUTHBERT (1897–1962)

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, but moved with his family to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1902. Initially home-schooled, he entered public school when he was eight years old. Faulkner was reared in the Methodist Church, but became a nominal Episcopalian in adulthood. Leaving high school in 1915, he befriended Yale law student Phil Stone. Both he and Stone shared a fascination with modern literature, and under Stone’s guidance Faulkner began to read the works of authors whose styles would later influence his own writing. Rejected for American military service in World War I, he went to Canada, trained with the Royal Air Force, but saw no action abroad. Back in Oxford, Faulkner was enrolled briefly at the University of Mississippi, where he contributed book reviews and artwork to campus publications. In the early 1920s he made literary pilgrimages to New Orleans and Paris. The first of his 19 novels, Soldiers’ Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927), failed to attract an appreciative readership. Not until the publication of Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury in 1929 did Faulkner become widely known. His bold use of the stream-of-consciousness technique prompted critics to hail the Mississippian as a remarkable talent and as a leading figure in the Southern literary renascence. But his greatest accomplishment lay in his skill to make universal the characters and events in his mythical Yoknapatawpha County. Forced by economic necessity to work as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s and 1940s, he saw his literary fortunes plummet until critic Malcolm Cowley edited and issued The Portable Faulkner (1949). Other significant novels include As I Lay Dying (1930),

Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet

(1940), Go Down, Moses (1942), Intruder in the Dust (1948), A Fable (Pulitzer Prize, 1954), and The Reivers (Pulitzer Prize, 1962). Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949 (conferred in 1950), Faulkner was appointed writer-in-residence and lecturer at the University of Virginia in 1957. He died in Byhalia, Mississippi.

As a child, Faulkner read the works of Henry Fielding, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Honoré de Balzac. Later, with Stone’s encouragement, he delved into the writings of the modernists: James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, the French symbolist poets (especially Stéphane Mallarmé), Marcel

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Proust, Sir James G. Frazer, Gertrude Stein, and Sherwood Anderson. Joyce’s Ulysses moved Faulkner to use the interior monologue in such works as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Mann’s Buddenbrooks may have inspired The Sound and the Fury. The inf luence of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams is evident in the free-association monologues in As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. Bergson’s Creative Evolution had a pronounced effect on Faulkner’s theology. The symbolists’ doctrine that words—as symbols—should “suggest” rather than “state,” encouraged what many have seen as Faulkner’s “faults” as a novelist, among them obscurity and delayed revelation. Proust’s toyings with time in À la récherche du temps perdu perhaps led to the creation of various time levels in The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner’s interest in myths and legends owes much to Frazer’s The Golden Bough; Faulkner even chose the name of his Oxford home, Rowan Oak, after consulting this volume. His often-anguished stream-of- consciousness passages echo Stein’s use of leitmotifs. Impressed with Anderson’s attack-on-the-village theme in Winesburg, Ohio, Faulkner was moved to create his own fictitious realm, Yoknapatawpha County. Twice in 1924 he journeyed to New Orleans just to meet Anderson, who was for a time the young writer’s mentor. In a 1956 interview Faulkner cited numerous other literary inf luences: the Old Testament, Charles Dickens, Miguel de Cervantes, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Herrick, Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson, John Donne, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, A. E. Housman, Mark Twain, and George Washington Harris (Forkner and Samway 1986, 668-71). Joseph Blotner notes Faulkner’s respect for Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying (Blotner 1976, 2:1760, 1806). Faulkner’s debt to the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible is obvious, as we see in such titles as Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!, Father Abraham, and Go Down, Moses, and in the plots of The Sound and the Fury, Pylon, and A Fable.

Archives

Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.: Faulkner’s personal library (partial), draft manuscripts, correspondence.

John Davis Williams Library, University of Mississippi, University, Miss.: Draft manuscripts, Nobel Prize citation and medallion, and artwork and book reviews from Faulkner’s student days.

Rowan Oak, Old Taylor Road, Oxford, Miss.: Faulkner’s personal library (partial), other items.

Printed Sources

Blotner, Joseph Leo. William Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1976).

Brooks, Cleanth. Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).

Forkner, Ben, and Patrick Samway (eds.). A Modern Southern Reader, rev. 4th edition (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1986).

Stein, Jean. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series [Interview with William Faulkner], Malcolm Cowley (ed.), The Paris Review, 1957, 1958.

Webb, James W. William Faulkner of Oxford (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965).

Harry McBrayer Bayne

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