Dictionary of Literary Influences

Fellini, Federico

FELLINI, FEDERICO (1920–1993)

Federico Fellini was born in Rimini, Italy, in 1920, son of Ida Barbiani, housewife, and Urbano Fellini, a sales representative. He received a Roman Catholic education at both the primary and the high schools in Rimini that strongly inf luenced his artistic life and spent free time reading comics, playing the puppet theater, and watching American movies. His favorite authors were Gustave Flaubert, Jean-Paul Sartre, Carlos Castaneda and Samuel Beckett. After the school-leaving-examination he matriculated to the Faculty of Jurisprudence but never graduated. In 1938 he left Rimini for Florence and Rome, where he worked as a writer and cartoonist and toured with a theater company. His meeting with Aldo Fabrizi, an Italian actor, introduced him to the world of films, though he earned his living with The Funny Face Shop, which specialized in caricatures and photographs of American soldiers. In 1943 he married a young actress named Giulietta Masina, who appeared in many of his most successful films.

Fellini’s career as film writer, assistant, collaborator, and finally film director began in 1940 and was, at the beginning, subject to the restraints of Fascism. But censorship hit many of his films even in later years because of the audacity of some scenes (Fellini-Satyricon, 1969) or because of the representation of a generation without moral ideals (La Dolce Vita, 1959, which was condemned also by the Roman Catholic Church). His collaboration with film directors including Roberto Rossellini, Alberto Lattuada and Pietro Germi, begun in the 1940s, is considered to have produced some of the most poetic films in the history of cinematography. Fellini won many international prizes: Academy Awards for La Strada (1954), for Le Notti di Cabiria (1957), for 8 1/2 (1963), for Amarcord

(1973), and in 1992 for career achievement. He also received a Leone d’Argento (Silver Lion) for I Vitelloni (The Young and Passionate, 1953) and for La Strada, and a Leone d’Oro (Gold Lion) at the Venice Film Festival in 1985 for his career. La Dolce Vita won the Golden Palm in Cannes in 1960. After Amarcord, a moving representation of Fellini’s inner and outer worlds mixing autobiography and quotation, memory and fantasy, dream and reality, the film director shot La Città delle Donne (City of Women, 1979), E la Nave va (And the Ship Sails On,

1983), and Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1984), starring once again his wife Giulietta Masina together with Marcello Mastroianni, the favorite protagonist of his films. Fellini’s last film was La Voce della Luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1989). He died in 1993.

Archives

Fondazione Federico Fellini, Rimini.

Printed Sources

Alpert, Hollis. Fellini, A Life (New York: Atheneum, 1986). Baxter, John. Fellini (London: Fourth Estate, 1993).

Burke, Frank. Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern (New York: Twayne, 1996). Fellini, Federico. Fellini on Fellini (London: Methuen, 1976).

Salachas, Gilbert. Federico Fellini (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998).

Maria Tabaglio

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Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key

FITZGERALD, FRANCIS SCOTT KEY (1896–1940)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended Princeton University between 1913 and 1917 but failed to graduate, and from 1918 to 1919 he was a member of the army. He married in 1920 and achieved overnight success with the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Stories in The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Magazine, and H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set followed. In 1922 Fitzgerald published Tales of the Jazz Age and his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned. His most accomplished and critically acclaimed book, The Great Gatsby, followed in 1925 and portrayed the American Dream corrupted. The Fitzgeralds lived and traveled primarily in Europe between 1924 and 1931, a period marked by personal turmoil and excess. Tender Is the Night (1934), a novel nine years in the making, reproduces the incipience of the mental illness of Fitzgerald’s wife and depicts the collapse of Western ideals. Between 1927 and 1940 Fitzgerald worked as a Hollywood screenwriter. He moved to Los Angeles in 1937 and began writing The Last Tycoon (1941), an unfinished novel posthumously edited by Edmund Wilson. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on December 21, 1940, after which Wilson edited The Crack-Up (1945), a collection of Fitzgerald’s essays and letters.

As a child, Fitzgerald subscribed “to the St. Nicholas, a popular children’s magazine published by Charles Scribner’s Sons” (Bruccoli 1981, 19), and he later remembered being “filled . . . with the saddest and most yearning emotion” upon reading an unidentified “nursery book” about lost innocence (quoted in Bruccoli 1981, 19). The young Fitzgerald also read the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Byron, and an early interest in history attracted him to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), the G. A. Henty books, and Edward Stratemeyer’s Tom Swift series. In early adulthood Fitzgerald admired the intelligence and technique of Joseph Conrad, imitating Conrad’s style from the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), Lord Jim (1899–1900), and “The Secret Sharer” (1910) in the themes, conclusion, and unreliable narrator of The Great Gatsby. Famous at a young age, Fitzgerald eagerly promoted the careers of fellow writers, introducing acquaintance Ernest Hemingway to Scribner’s editor and friend Maxwell Perkins and recommending, through favorable reviews and personal references, Nathanael West, Franz Kaf ka, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, and Ring Lardner, the latter of whom he thought possessed a “noble dignity.” In Europe, Fitzgerald met several authors whom he read and admired: Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, John Galsworthy, Theodore Dreiser, and James Joyce. He sought to emulate the style of Gustave Flaubert and Hemingway and advised Thomas Wolfe to write more sparingly, prompting Wolfe to depict Fitzgerald unflatteringly in You Can’t Go Home Again (1941). Yet Wolfe later wrote a letter, included in The Crack-Up, in praise of Fitzgerald’s talent. Toward the end of his life, Fitzgerald knew T. S. Eliot and novelist John O’Hara, and worked with legendary film producer Irving Thalberg, model for the protagonist of The Last Tycoon.

Archives

Firestone Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University,

N.J.: extensive collection of photographs, book illustrations, correspondence, manu-

scripts.

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Ford, Henry

Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.: over 12,000 holdings; revised manuscripts, galley proofs of The Great Gatsby, only extant copies of play from Princeton years, revised pages from early short stories, For Whom the Bell Tolls inscribed to Fitzgerald by Hemingway, correspondence, personal items.

Printed Sources

Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur (N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981). LeVot, André. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, William Byron (trans.), (N.Y.: Doubleday,

1983).

Meyers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography ( N.Y.: Harper Collins, 1994).

Tiffany Aldrich

FORD, HENRY (1863–1947)

Henry Ford was born on a farm in Springwells Township, Wayne County, Michigan, the second of eight children born to William Ford, a farmer of Protestant Irish descent, and his wife Mary, née Litogot. His formal education was limited to classes at a one-room school he attended when not working on the farm between 1871 and 1879. Leaving for Detroit in 1879 to seek employment as a mechanic, Ford was barely proficient in writing and reading but had already shown an intuitive understanding of machinery. After his apprenticeship in a machine shop, Ford worked as an engineer for several firms, among them Westinghouse and the Edison Illuminating Company, while spending some of his spare time experimenting on an internal combustion engine to power an automobile. In 1899 he founded the first company to manufacture motorcars in Detroit, four years later the Ford Motor Company. It was this company that in 1908 advertised Ford’s Model T or “Tin Lizzy,” which was to change America economically, socially, and culturally. It catapulted the nation, especially the rural population, into the modern age. Intended to be an object of utility for the masses, particularly for farmers, not one of luxury for the rich, 15.5 million Model T cars were sold in the United States alone until production ceased in 1927: the first mass-produced car only to be surpassed half a century later by the VW Beetle. A success like this needed more than a knack for constructing an engine and a car. Ford revolutionized industrialism when he introduced assembly-line production and with his view of capitalism summed up as “Fordism.” He realized that reduction of costs meant market expansion, that higher wages meant more buying power. From 1914 onward he paid his workers the highest wages in the industry if the employees had proved eligible by conforming to their employer’s notion of social outlook and moral behavior. This made Ford the target of much criticism. People reacted critically, too, to a series of antisemitic articles published under his name in the early 1920s and combined in the book The International Jew (1922)—said to have made Adolf Hitler an admirer of Ford.

To many of his contemporaries the epitome of capitalism and an age dominated by the machine, Henry Ford was deeply rooted in the concepts and values of his rural Midwest upbringing. The staple diet of his—and many other nineteenthcentury children’s—reading at school, the McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, impressed him so much that he not only felt some of his moral precepts and his respect for wildlife and nature reinforced by certain passages, but collected editions of the Readers when he became a successful car manufacturer, ending up with a collection

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second only to that of the university where William Holmes McGuffey had taught. Obsessed with the common man and a rural life that the advent of the Model T had done much to destroy, Ford accumulated American objects from everyday life, utensils, tools, furnishings, machines, and even completely furnished rooms and buildings, including a reconstruction of his own country school room, Thomas Alva Edison’s laboratory at Menlo Park, and the birthplace of McGuffey. These Americana were later housed and displayed at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in order to educate the public in pioneer virtues such as hard work, self-reliance, and thrift.

In sending a Model T as a gift to the naturalist and poet John Burroughs, whose works the manufacturer had read “with great pleasure” (quoted in Gelderman 1981, 189), Ford again demonstrated his life-long endeavor to reconcile nature and technology, to see the machine firmly placed and accepted in the garden. Burroughs discussed with Ford other influential writers on nature and human existence in communion with it, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It was on their writings that much of Ford’s reading centered. The ideas he found in them converged with some of his own values, his love for nature, his idealization of the simple life, and his anti-city bias. In Henry Ford, these existed side by side with a fascination for the machine and a concept of the car as a necessity to ordinary people.

In 1888, Ford had married Clara Jane, née Bryant, the daughter of a neighboring farmer. Their only child, Edsel, had been born to them in 1896. Henry Ford died at his Fair Lane estate, 10 miles west of Detroit, in 1947.

Archives

Ford Archives of the Edison Institute in Dearborn, Michigan.

Printed Sources

Ford, Henry. My Life and Work (New York: Doubleday, 1922).

Gelderman, Carol. Henry Ford. The Wayward Capitalist (New York: The Dial Press, 1981). Lacey, Robert, Ford: The Man and the Machine (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,

1986).

Lewis, David L. The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and his Company

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976).

Nevins, Allan, and Frank Ernest Hill. Ford: Decline and Rebirth: 1933–1962 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962).

———.Ford: Expansion and Challenge: 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957).

———.Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954).

Angela Schwarz

FORD, JOHN (1894–1973)

Born John Martin Feeney, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on February 1, 1894 (although he often said he was Sean Aloysius O’Feeney, born in 1895), future film director John Ford first chose the pseudonym “Jack Ford” when he began to work for Universal Studios in 1914 and adopted “John Ford” only in 1923. He was the thirteenth and last child of Irish Catholic parents who often spoke Gaelic at home. His parents had emigrated from Galway in 1872 and married three years later. The

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young boy went to the Emerson Grammar School in Portland. In 1914, John Feeney got his degree from the Portland High School; according to Ford himself, his history teacher, William B. Jack, “was the most influential figure in his life after his father” (Gallagher 1986, 6). In 1914, he went to Hollywood, where his older brother Francis “Ford” worked as a film director, scriptwriter, and actor. The future John Ford became a stuntman and assistant between 1914 and 1917. Between 1917 and 1966, he directed some one hundred thirty films, almost half of them silent movies (many of those are lost). Apart from numerous westerns (such as

Stagecoach in 1939, My Darling Clementine in 1946, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in 1962), he also made melodramas, biographies (The Adventures of Marco Polo, 1938; Young Mister Lincoln, 1939; The Long Grey Line, 1955) and even some propaganda films produced by the United States Navy (The Battle of Midway, 1942;

This is Korea!, 1951; Korea: Battleground for Liberty, 1959). In the Monument Valley studios in Arizona, he created a whole vision of the American West. Ford contributed to the recognition of western movies as a respected cinematographic genre.

Ford discovered books at the age of eight, during a long convalescence after a diphtheria attack. “Ford was quoted as having always dreamed of filming Conan Doyle’s White Company, which he claimed to have read each year since he was eight” (Gallagher 1986, 452). Among filmmakers, Ford admired D. W. Griffith, with whom he worked once as an extra in Birth of a Nation (1915), his favorite movie (Gallagher 1986, 14 and 452). He met German director F. W. Murnau in Berlin in 1927 and said that Murnau’s Sunrise was “the greatest picture that has been produced” (Gallagher 1986, 50). Expressionist influence can be noticed in Ford’s Four Sons (1928), Hangman’s House (1928), and The Informer (1935). Ford said he respected some early Cecil B. DeMille movies, but not the person. Ford also appreciated films directed by his friends: Leo McCarey, Frank Capra, Raoul Walsh, Tay Garnett, Henry King, and Samuel Fuller (Gallagher 1986, 453). Apart from some of his first silent short films (written with the help of his brother Francis Ford, writer Dudley Nichols, and actor Harry Carey), Ford scarcely wrote scripts, preferring various screenwriters (more than a hundred in half a century) who freely adapted short stories, biographies, and popular novels (by authors such as James Warner Bellah and many Irish writers). Notable exceptions are John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory for The Fugitive (1947). On the visual side, Tag Gallagher (1986, 258) notes strong influences by such artists as Frederic Remington, Eugène Delacroix, and Matthew Brady. It is interesting to observe Ford’s tribute to his Irish ancestors in less typical movies such as Mary Stuart (1936), The Plough and the Stars (1936), The Quiet Man

(1952), The Rising of the Moon (1957; these two were shot in Ireland), and Donovan’s Reef (1963).

Archives

The John Ford Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University. Reminiscences, correspondence. John Ford archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Personal papers, manuscripts, cor-

respondence.

John Ford files at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood, California. Films.

John Ford archives at the Universal Studios, Hollywood, California. Personal papers, photographs.

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Forster, Edward Morgan

Printed Sources

Darby, William. John Ford’s Westerns: A Thematic Analysis, with a Filmography ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 1996). Includes a chapter on Ford’s western literary sources and their adaptations.

Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

Gallagher, Tag. John Ford. The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

Levy, Bill. John Ford: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998).

Peary, Gerald, and Jenny Lefcourt (eds.). John Ford Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2001).

Studlar, Gaylyn, and Matthew Bernstein (eds.). John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001).

Yves Laberge

FORSTER, EDWARD MORGAN (1879–1970)

E. M. Forster, novelist and critic, was born in London. From 1893 to 1897 he attended Tonbridge School, studying Greek and Latin, and proceeded to King’s College, Cambridge, with disappointing results in classics (1900) and history (1901). During his years at Cambridge he abandoned his religious faith and recognized that he was homosexual, two steps that shaped the rest of his life. His early novels critique the conventions of Edwardian society and protest the spread of suburbia. Howards End (1910), a sensitive articulation of the clash between commercial imperialism and personal morality, established him as an important writer on both sides of the Atlantic. In the last novel published during his lifetime, A Passage to India (1924), Forster depicts Hindus and Muslims as unable to shake off prejudices inherited from the past and their British rulers as more culpably prejudiced, since they reject the liberal tradition of their own culture in order to avoid the duty of understanding the peoples they govern. Forster’s fiction, like the essays, radio talks, and other writings with which he occupied the remainder of his long life, is a humanist’s plea for responsibility and mutual understanding in an increasingly complex and mechanized world.

Forster’s reading practices are illustrated in the Commonplace Book he kept fitfully from 1924 to 1964. In preparing the lectures published as Aspects of the Novel (1927), he read (following the advice of Virginia Woolf ) key works of eighteenthcentury English fiction; five years later he read widely in tragic drama, though no significant writing of his own resulted. His entries include passages which stimulated his thinking on larger issues and passages which struck him as remarkable in themselves or strikingly relevant to contemporary events. A sense of the wide range of Forster’s reading is supplied by his essay collections, Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951). He pays tribute to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), an appealingly unpretentious work of genius which showed him that satire can be amusing without losing its incisiveness. Another work of skeptical irony, Gibbon’s

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, belongs with Dante’s Divine Comedy in Forster’s lists of great books which had influenced him, along with Shakespeare and his favorite novelist, Jane Austen. He greatly admired Marcel Proust, ranking A la Récherche du Temps Perdu as the next greatest novel after Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In these authors, as in Emily Brontë, he found clarity of vision and honesty in presen-

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tation, qualities he strove to achieve in his own writing. His 1930 obituary of D. H. Lawrence affirming his genius was controversial, but Forster refused to recant. In 1935 he almost became the first biographer of T. E. Lawrence, whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom had moved him deeply. Despite his rejection of Christianity, Forster had no doubt of the reality of evil, something he found adequately rendered in literature only by Dostoyevsky and Herman Melville, whose Billy Budd he helped to adapt for Benjamin Britten’s opera (1950). An influence of a different kind was the books of Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), follower of Walt Whitman and an exponent of simple living and “homogenic love.” A visit to Carpenter’s community at Milthorpe in Yorkshire in 1913 inspired the novel Maurice, not published until after the author’s death (1971).

Archives

King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge, England: letters, literary manuscripts, personal papers.

Harry Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas, Austin: letters, literary manuscripts.

Printed Sources

Forster, E. M. Commonplace Book, Philip Gardner (ed.), (London: Scolar, 1985). Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life, 2 vols. (London: Secker, 1977–78).

Lago, Mary. E. M. Forster: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).

John D. Baird

FOUCAULT, MICHEL (1926–1984)

Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France. His family was Catholic but rather anticlerical, and the young Foucault was not fond of religion. He studied at the Collège St. Stanislas in Poitiers (1940–45), the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris (1945–46), and the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1946–50). Foucault studied philosophy, psychology, and psychopathology, earning a degree in the latter from the Institut de Psychologie in 1952. He held teaching positions in France, Sweden, Tunisia, and the United States, and he was elected to the Collège de France in 1969. Foucault’s corpus is highly diverse, but it often focuses on ways in which so-called human nature is changeable and on how power functions in and through discourse. His work has been particularly influential in cultural studies, literary theory, historiography, sociology, political science, the history of sexuality, and queer theory.

As was often the case in the postwar period, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and phenomenology were dominant intellectual influences in the Parisian educational establishment, and Foucault’s intellectual training, marked in particular by the teaching of Jean Hyppolite at Henri-IV, was no exception. In a 1978 interview, however, he explains that Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and Georges Bataille were the writers that allowed him to free himself from Hegel and phenomenology since “they didn’t have the problem of constructing systems” but had “direct, personal experiences” (Foucault 1991, 30). Reading Nietzsche in the 1950s produced a “philosophical shock,” strongly influencing the subsequent composition of Madness and Civilization (1961) in the preface of which Foucault defines the long-term goal of his work as “under the sun of the great Nietzschean quest” (see Miller 1993, 67). The genealogical aspect of this quest is discussed in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971). Foucault returned to reading

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Nietzsche in the 1970s as well, as evidenced by Discipline and Punish (1975). His work also engages with Karl Marx, often to reject his influence. The first volume of his History of Sexuality (1976) famously argues against Freudian psychoanalysis and the repressive hypothesis. His well-known lecture “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud” (1964) displays the influence of the three thinkers, but with a clear preference for the first. Other influential German philosophers included Martin Heidegger and Immanuel Kant. Foucault acknowledges the influence of Kantian “critique” in The Order of Things (1966) and at the beginning of “Foucault,” an encyclopedia entry Foucault wrote on himself near the end of his life (see Miller 1993, 137–42).

Archives

Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), Paris: Recordings of lectures and a few unpublished manuscripts available to researchers. Because of Foucault’s popularity, most of his writings and interviews have been published.

Printed Sources

Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault, Betsy Wing (trans.), (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

Faubion, James D. (ed.). Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemolog y: Essential Works of Foucault

(1954–84), vols. II, III (New York: The New Press, 1994).

Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984,

Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), Alan Sheridan (trans.), and others (New York: Routledge, 1988).

———. Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (trans.), (New York: Semiotext[e], 1991).

Macey, David. The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993). Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).

Todd W. Reeser

FRANCO BAHAMONDE, FRANCISCO (1892–1975)

Francisco Franco was born in El Ferrol, Galicia, Spain, to a middle-class naval family. He attended two primary schools in El Ferrol, Sagrado Corazón and Colegio de la Marina. During Franco’s formative years, his father separated from his family. His mother, María del Bahamonde, a conservative, moralistic Catholic, influenced her son’s pious religious and moral views. He trained as an army cadet in Toledo’s Academy of the Alcázar and was accepted into the officer corps. Franco was posted to Morocco, Africa (1912), where he developed his military reputation and subsequently became Europe’s youngest brigadier general (1926). He directed the Military Academy of Zaragoza (1927), commanded the Brigade of Infantry, La Coruña (1932), and was promoted to major general and returned to Morocco (1934). Franco considered military intervention against the Second Republic (1934–36) because of “undesirable ideology.” With the left-wing election victory and the outbreak of civil war (1936), Franco conspired to overthrow the government.

Supported by the Falange in 1938, he seized Spanish state and military powers when the Spanish Civil War ended (1939). His worldview was of limited cultural and economic training with fascist political ideas rooted in his military experience during Spain’s decline. Franco’s major accomplishment was to become the head of the Spanish state through military achievements and remain Spain’s self-appointed Caudillo from 1938 to 1975. He linked Spain to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini,

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and the Axis powers, and guided Spain out of civil war and into international isolation. With the advent of the Cold War, he signed a treaty with the United States (1953), which led to a more open Spain of economic and social reform.

Franco read, wrote, and influenced Spanish literature. During his seminal period, Franco read the Bible, memorized texts of the Roman Catholic dogma, and studied military history. Franco was fascinated with the medieval ballad El Cantar del Mío Cid and wanted to emulate El Cid—Spain’s great warrior, legend, and savior. He studied the Spanish military textbook, Reglamento provisional para la instrucción de las tropas de Infantería, in which he read about military philosophy, discipline, moral virtues, bravery, rules, obedience, loyalty, patriotism, and the army as the nation’s guardian. The young Franco was disturbed by press reports of domestic anarchy and loss of civil control. In the early 1920s, he penned the autobiographical novel, Raza, and his diary Diario de una bandera (1922). Franco espoused “Regenerationism,” a literary and philosophical movement that aimed to reinvigorate and reform Spain, born out of the loss of the Spanish–American War and other colonial holdings in 1898. Franco’s own production ranged from early books (e.g., Masonería) to his numerous speeches and treatises when he served as head of state. He maintained correspondence with protagonists of the day such as Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. Later Franco would be characterized in works of historical fiction such as Autobiografia del general Franco by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1992) offering interpretative insights into Franco’s literary formation and writings.

Franco both read and used Spain’s rightist monarchist newspaper, the ABC, to promote his regime. Literature and journalism of the Franco period were permeated by Franco’s presence. After the civil war, Spanish literary figures were exiled abroad to avoid Franco’s censorship (e.g., Jorge Guillén, Rafael Alberti). However, within Francoist Spain a viable moderate literary and intellectual culture worthy of critical attention evolved. Literary language of the Franco period was characterized by vagueness, metaphor, double-speak, and a language of silence. Most fiction of the Franco era avoided fantasy and underscored social conditions.

Archives

Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Archivo General, Madrid.

Serrano Suñer Papers, Madrid.

Templewood Papers, University Library, Cambridge.

Printed Sources

Bardavío, Joaquín, and Justino Sinova. Todo Franco: Franquismo y antifranquismo de la A a la Z

(Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 2000).

Cierva, Ricardo de la. Historia del franquismio. Aislamiento, transformación, agonía (1945–75) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1978).

Franco Bahamonde, Francisco. Pensamiento politico de Franco (Antología), 2 vols. (Madrid: Ediciones del Movimiento, 1975).

Herzberger, David. “History as Power, Fiction as Dissent: Writing the Past in Franco’s Spain,” West Virginia University Philological Papers, 44 (1998–99), 1–9.

Ilie, Paul. “Dictatorship and Literature: The Model of Francoist Spain,” Ideologies and Literature 4, 17 (1983), 238–55.

Preston, Paul. Franco: A Biography (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

Sheri Spaine Long

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Friedan, Betty

FRIEDAN, BETTY (1921– )

Betty Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, just six months after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution extended the franchise to women. She studied at Smith College from 1938 to 1942, began graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, that same year, and ultimately chose to decline a Ph.D. fellowship in psychology. She has since received a number of honorary degrees from universities across the United States. Known for both her publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and her role in founding the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, Friedan has earned an international reputation as a leader, writer, speaker, lobbyist, and activist for equality. Early experiences with gender bias and antisemitism stimulated Friedan to care deeply about social justice and to engage the cause fearlessly.

By excelling in school and reading socially conscious fiction by Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, young Friedan came to love reading so much that she dreamed of a career as a librarian. Her affinity for the written word instead helped make her the author who would challenge and sharpen the thinking of her many readers, admirers and detractors alike. Although an avid reader as a child, Friedan was introduced to great literature in college. She delighted in courses exposing her to such formative feminist texts as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own. While at Smith, Friedan also took many writing courses, and her short stories bore the influence of the social fiction of John Steinbeck (1902–68) and John Dos Passos (1896–1970). By the time she graduated, Friedan combined her interests in humanistic psychology and protest literature with cultural commentaries on social class by Karl Marx (1818–83) and Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929). Years later, as she prepared to write her first book, The Feminine Mystique, many readings shaped her thinking, but none more than the writings of Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86). Advocating women’s autonomy as de Beauvoir had before her, Friedan rebutted all those in the 1950s—from psychological theorists to editors of popular magazines—contending that careers, higher education, political rights, and independence posed threats to women’s vitality and femininity. Most conspicuously, she critiqued gender bias in the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) as “sexual solipsism.” Friedan drew from Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions the concept of paradigm shifts, to suggest a redefinition of gender perception. In doing so, Friedan framed a cultural critique that would play a definitive part in the women’s movement.

As an agent for change, Friedan has aligned her activism not only with NOW, but also with such organizations as the National Women’s Political Caucus and the National Abortion and Reproduction Rights Action League. Since penning The Feminist Mystique, Friedan has maintained her role in promoting civil rights for women and has worked to fight age discrimination in much the same way she took on sexism earlier in her career. She serves as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell University and director of the New Paradigm Program. Her other books include It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (1976), The Second Stage (1981), The Fountain of Age (1993), Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family (1997), and a memoir, Life So Far (2000). Friedan’s work to advance equality has, in turn, influenced the lives and writings not only of subsequent feminists, but also of countless others who seek to combat bias in language, law, and everyday life.

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