Dictionary of Literary Influences
.pdfFriedman, Milton
Archives
Friedan’s personal and professional papers spanning 1933–93, including clippings, writings as a student, manuscripts and typescripts, lectures and materials from her teaching career, and items associated with her organizational affiliations, including NOW, can be found in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass. Supplementary material is available through the Smith College Archives and the Peoria Public Library.
Printed Sources
Friedan, Betty. Life So Far (New York: Touchstone Books, 2001).
Hennessee, Judith. Betty Friedan: Her Life (New York: Random House, 1999).
Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
Sherman, Janann (ed.). Interviews with Betty Friedan (Oxford, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2002).
Linda S. Watts
FRIEDMAN, MILTON (1912– )
Milton Friedman was born in Brooklyn, New York. Friedman’s parents, his wife, and many of his intellectual mentors were immigrants, therefore strongly influencing his views on open immigration. He was Jewish but considered himself a complete agnostic. Friedman earned the equivalent of two bachelor of arts degrees from Rutgers University (1932) in mathematics and economics. He earned a master of arts degree from the University of Chicago (1933) and a doctorate from Colombia University (1946); both were in the area of economics. On June 25, 1938, Friedman married Rose Director, whom he met in Jacob Viner’s economic theory course while they were graduate students at the University of Chicago. Rose, an accomplished economist in her own right, played a substantial role in reading and critiquing everything Milton published (Friedman and Friedman 1998, xii). Friedman held a variety of positions with government research departments. He served as associate economist for the National Resources Committee (1935–37) and as a research member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (1937–46, 1948–81). Additionally, he served as the principal economist for the Division of Tax Research, U.S. Treasury Department (1941–43) and associate director of the Statistical Research Group, Division of War Research, Columbia University (1943–45). Friedman also held a number of academic positions including posts at Columbia University (1937–40), the University of Wisconsin (1940–41), the University of Minnesota (1945–46), and the University of Chicago (1946–82), filling the position that had been Jacob Viner’s.
In 1976, Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic science. From 1977, Friedman held a senior research position at the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace in Stanford, California. Friedman is widely regarded as the leader of the “Chicago school” of monetary economics. He has written extensively on public policy and was a contributing editor to Newsweek magazine (1966–84). Friedman’s public-policy writing always had a primary emphasis on the preservation and extension of individual freedom. The success of his advocacy has been
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enormous, and opinion in Western countries has moved decisively in its preference for those economic freedoms that he so eloquently advocated.
Friedman considers two of the most influential individuals in his life to be Arthur Burns and Homer Jones, both Rutgers faculty members. In one of the former’s seminars, Friedman and another student spent the semester going over a draft of Burns’s doctoral dissertation, Production Trends in the United States. In addition to introducing Friedman to highly sophisticated scientific research, Burns influenced Friedman by having him read Alfred Marshall’s works, especially Principles of Economics (1898). Homer Jones, a disciple of Frank Knight, introduced Friedman to what would be known as the Chicago school view of individual freedom. Especially influential was Knight’s book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921). These two professors instilled a love of economics that led Friedman to change his aspiration away from an actuarial career. Jones’s connections at the University of Chicago influenced Friedman’s choice of graduate school.
At Chicago, Friedman recalls being heavily influenced by Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, Henry Schultz, and an outstanding group of graduate students. Especially important, according to Friedman’s memoirs, was Viner’s class in economic theory. Friedman has described his time working under Viner as the greatest intellectual experience of his life. The year at Chicago was followed by graduate work at Columbia University where Harold Hotelling’s course in mathematical statistics and Wesley C. Mitchell’s mentoring and empirical emphasis had a great influence on Friedman’s later intellectual work. An important book that reinforced Friedman’s understanding of economic theory applied to empirical problems was John Maurice Clark’s Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs (1923). After leaving Columbia, Friedman spent a year as a research assistant on Henry Schultz’s The Theory and Measurement of Demand (1938). Friedman remarked that working on Schultz’s book shaped his future approach to the theory of business cycles.
Friedman’s work during the New Deal and World War II honed his practical application of empirical data to economic theory. The data collected at the National Resources Committee for a large consumer budget study facilitated some of Friedman’s early ideas on consumption function that were more fully developed later. In 1937, Friedman went to work for Simon Kuznets, another future Noble laureate, at the National Bureau of Economic Research. This research served as the basis for Friedman’s Ph.D. dissertation and was published jointly, with Kuznets, as
Incomes from Independent Professional Practice (1946). Here for the first time, Friedman introduced the important distinction between “permanent” and “transitory” income. This was one of the two principal components of his consumption theory, later developed fully in Theory of the Consumption Function (1957). In 1941, Friedman took up an appointment with the Division of Tax Research of the U.S. Treasury. His experience there dealing with macroeconomic policy, Keynesian economics, and the relative importance of monetary and taxation policy started Friedman on the road to the key economic concepts that would become his principal professional interest.
Archives
Register of the Milton Friedman Archives, 1931–91, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, California.
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Printed Sources
Breit, William, and Roger W. Spencer (eds.). Lives of the Laureates: Thirteen Nobel Economists
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).
Friedman, Milton, and Rose D. Friedman. Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Leube, Kurt R. (ed.). The Essence of Friedman (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1987).
Craig T. Cobane
FROST, ROBERT LEE (1874–1963)
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California. After his father died in 1885, the family relocated to New Hampshire, near his father’s parents in Lawrence, Massachusetts. His Scottish Presbyterian-turned-Swedenborgian mother read aloud from William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and Ralph Waldo Emer- son—poets Frost cited as precedents for his musical, colloquial diction (Frost 1966, 4). Emerson’s “Monadnoc” was a powerful early influence (Frost 1995, 693). Frost also acknowledged debt to the ancients; in 1958, Frost named Homer’s The Odyssey and Catullus’s poems as “Books That Have Meant the Most,” just behind the Old Testament (Frost 1995, 852).
Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892 as covaledictorian, gifted in Greek and Latin. After spending one semester at Dartmouth College, Frost withdrew and worked as a teacher, miller, and newspaperman. Meanwhile, he studied Shakespeare and English lyric poems from Francis Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, along with scientific works like Richard Proctor’s Our Place Among the Infinities, Mrs. William Starr Dana’s How to Know the Golden Flowers, and Charles Darwin’s
The Voyage of the Beagle.
In 1897 Frost enrolled at Harvard, where he read William James’s Psycholog y: The Briefer Course and studied under George Santayana (Parini 1999, 61–62). After quitting Harvard in 1899, Frost raised poultry and taught in New Hampshire to support his wife, Elinor (his covaledictorian) and their children. Their first son, Elliott, died in 1900. In 1901 Frost read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; he later said Walden and Ivan Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches “had a good deal to do with the making of me” (Frost 1964, 182). Frost’s reading reinforced Emerson’s idea that natural objects correspond to larger truths. He observed his neighbors’ speech, too, and wrote those “sentence sounds” at his kitchen table at night. In 1911 Frost read Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which praised poets’ ability to transcend a scientific worldview (Parini 1999, 110).
In 1912 Frost took his family to England, published his first book, A Boy’s Will, and met William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats’s colloquialism and Pound’s imagism influenced Frost (Parini 1999, 243, 254). Pound and others favorably reviewed Frost’s book; when Frost returned to America in 1915, he had an audience.
Over the next four decades, Frost held positions at Amherst College, the University of Michigan, Dartmouth, and Harvard while lecturing nationwide. He received 44 honorary degrees and won four Pulitzer Prizes while facing the loss of two more children, his son Carol by suicide in 1940.
Frost’s later poetry touched on politics; he opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—in 1934 Frost said he admired the self-sufficiency in Daniel Defoe’s
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Robinson Crusoe (Frost 1995, 738). He became friendly with both Dwight D. Eisenhower’s and John F. Kennedy’s administrations, becoming the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration, for Kennedy in 1961. In 1962, a few months before his death, Frost flew to the Soviet Union and met with Premier Nikita Khruschev and poet Anna Akhmatova.
Archives
Major collections housed at Dartmouth College (Frost’s notebooks); New York University’s Fales Library (Frost’s books); Amherst College’s Robert Frost Memorial Library; and the Jones Library, Amherst, Massachusetts.
Printed Sources
Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (eds.), (New York: Library of America, 1995).
———.Interviews with Robert Frost. Edward Connery Lathem (ed.), (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1966).
———.Selected Letters, Robert Frost. Lawrance Thompson (ed.), (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1964).
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1999).
Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Discusses philosophical influences.
Thompson, Lawrance. Robert Frost, 3 vols. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1966, 1970, 1976). The definitive biography.
Tuten, Nancy Lewis, and John Zubizarreta (eds.). Robert Frost Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001).
Stephen J. Rippon
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GALBRAITH, JOHN KENNETH (1908– )
John Kenneth Galbraith was born in southwestern Ontario, Canada. He received a B.S. degree in animal husbandry from Ontario Agricultural College, now the University of Guelph, in 1931. That same year he won a fellowship to the University of California at Berkeley, where in 1933 he received an M.S. degree and in 1934 a Ph.D. in agricultural economics. In 1937 he married Katherine Atwater and became a United States citizen. He has spent most of his academic career at Harvard University, where in 1949 he became the Paul W. Warburg Professor of Economics. He served as ambassador to India for the Kennedy Administration in the early 1960s, and in 1970 was elected president of the American Economic Association. A gifted writer, Galbraith’s books and articles have been read and appreciated by a large public audience. Because of the popularity of his writings, Galbraith can be considered one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. His major contribution to economic thought has been his study of power relationships in economic systems and the social and ideological factors that support those relationships.
At Harvard, Galbraith wrote his most influential books, which include The Affluent Society (1958), The New Industrial State (1967), and Economics and the Public Purpose (1973). These books provide us with insights into some of the major influences on his literary development, but it is his essays written for different magazines and journals that give us the greatest insight of which thinkers and writers influenced him the most. Galbraith wrote in an essay “Writing and Typing” (Galbraith 1979, 286 ) that those who influenced him early in his writing career were not literary figures, but teachers and editors. By far, the most important person at this time that influenced his career and style of writing was Henry Robinson Luce, who Galbraith worked for at Fortune Magazine in the 1940s.
Known for his voracious reading habits, Galbraith mentioned many authors he enjoyed reading, but only a handful of literary figures that significantly influenced
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him. A common characteristic of these authors is their ability to write clear and witty sentences. Of this group of writers two stand out: The first is Evelyn Waugh, who Galbraith considers to be one of the best novelists of the twentieth century. Waugh influenced Galbraith’s use of the English language, his ability to come up with the right word or phrase in his writing, and developing sentences that end with irony and wit. Having been introduced to Waugh’s novels in 1945, Galbraith continued to read Waugh’s Scoop every summer. Next to Waugh, Galbraith put H. L. Mencken for his ability to express ideas clearly and distinctly. Other literary influences include Anthony Trollope, particularly his novels Barchester Towers, The Warden, and The Last Chronicle of Barset. Of economists who have influenced Galbraith’s literary style, Thorstein Veblen stands out for the clarity of his thought and subtle wit and irony. Finally, a late literary influence on Galbraith comes from a fellow Canadian, Robertson Davies, known for his Deptford trilogy that includes
Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders. Galbraith characterizes Davies as “ . . . one of the most learned, amusing and otherwise accomplished novelists of our century” (Galbraith 1986, 98).
Archives
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts, 02125-3398.
Printed Sources
Galbraith, J. K. Annals of an Abiding Liberal (New York: New American Library, 1979).
———. A View from the Stands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
Hession, Charles. John Kenneth Galbraith and His Critics (New York: New American Library, 1972).
Reisman, David. Galbraith and Market Capitalism (New York: New York University Press, 1980).
Sharpe, M. E. John Kenneth Galbraith and the Lower Economics (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1973).
Stanfield, James R. John Kenneth Galbraith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Richard P. F. Holt
GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARMCHAND (1869–1948)
Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian nationalist leader and champion of nonviolent activism, remains a cultural and spiritual icon around the world to this day. One of the inner circle of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi mobilized a great crosssection of the Indian populace in his determined, yet peaceful, campaign to end British rule in India. He became known around the world for his activities, from marching to the sea to break the British ban on making salt in 1930 to his negotiations with British viceroys in their imperial palaces, his desperate attempts to end the Hindu–Muslim violence which erupted at India’s partition in 1947, and finally his 1948 assassination by a Hindu extremist who resented Gandhi’s embrace of Muslims as fellow Indians. Gandhi’s legacy of nonviolent activism has remained profound since his death, influencing among others the American civil-rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Since Gandhi’s death, however, there has also been a tendency to portray Gandhi simply as a saint, an icon, or as a one-dimensional figure, whether it be in feature films or advertising campaigns for personal computers. The Mahatma (“Great Soul”) was in fact a complex and complicated man, one
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of great insight, imagination, and belief, but also one who remained intellectually curious, sometimes frustrated, and occasionally maddeningly stubborn.
One can see the extent of Gandhi’s wide-ranging and active intellect simply by reviewing the great number of literary works and figures that influenced both his spiritual and political development. He titled his autobiography “My Experiments with Truth,” reflecting in part his lifelong engagement with works of philosophy, theology, and history. It was a process begun in his youth in Gujarat in western India and continued through his sojourns in Britain, South Africa, and his later life in India. Jailed for his activities, first in South Africa, then in British India, Gandhi often spent his confinement in study and intensive reading. Much of his wide read- ing—everything from the Koran to the Bible to Ralph Waldo Emerson—informed his evolving philosophy of duty, nonviolence, and social justice, but there were particular works that were of fundamental importance to him personally and philosophically.
As a law student in London in the early 1900s, Gandhi fell in with members of the Theosophist movement, who introduced him to Hindu scriptures, works which had not been part of Gandhi’s English-style education in India. One in particular, the Bhagavad Gita, part of the larger epic Mahabharata, remained a central part of the rest of Gandhi’s life. As one of his biographers has put it, the Gita “became the supreme authority in his daily life” (Brown 1989, 77). The Gita, which recounts the god Krishna’s advice to the warrior Arjuna, focuses on the importance of duty and of nonattachment—that is, of distance from the world and its material and emotional ties, all in the aid of truth and spiritual discipline. The theme of renunciation remained key in Gandhi’s life, reflected in his embrace of fasting, simple clothing, and even brahmacharya (voluntary celibacy).
To Gandhi, the Gita instructed man to search for truth (God), something which could only be done through a life of service to one’s fellow beings and thus an embrace of all God’s creation. There were, however, two other works which greatly influenced the sort of service Gandhi would undertake and the way in which he would pursue his quest. These works profoundly shaped his first public activism, during his time in South Africa from 1893 to 1914 on behalf of the rights of Indian “coolies” or indentured laborers. In 1910, Gandhi founded his first experiment in simple, communal living, and named it Tolstoy Farm. A few years before, he had encountered the Russian author’s work, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a plea for a communitarian Christian life, based on the ideas of love through service and, even more important for Gandhi, of the rejection of aggression or violence, though not of activism in the service of justice. The other significant work Gandhi encountered in South Africa was John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, a critique of the inequalities of modern economies and of the science of political economy which promoted such inequality as necessity, and which ended with the declaration “There is no wealth but life.” Gandhi embraced Ruskin’s call for an egalitarian, moral economy, as became apparent in Gandhi’s 1910 publication, Hind Swaraj, which saw India’s regeneration possible only through a rejection of Western economic thought and a return to a simpler model based on agriculture and the moral economy of the rural village. Gandhi’s rejection of social distinctions and hierarchy was also apparent in his criticism of the treatment of Hindu “untouchables” in India in the 1930s.
These works were all significant in shaping Gandhi’s thought and actions, but they were hardly the only influences. To use a term from the anthropologist
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gandhi was a “bricoleur,” a jack-of-all-trades, embracing ideas and philosophies from a wide range of sources, constantly searching for social justice and equity, and, until the day he died, always “experimenting” in a quest for the truth that was his God.
Archives
Nehru Memorial Library, University of Delhi: Includes some private papers.
Printed Sources
Brown, Judith. Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Chatterjee, Margaret. Gandhi’s Religious Thought (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).
Fox, Richard. Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Gandhi, M. K. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1957).
———. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 6th rev. ed., 100 vol. (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 2000–2001).
Andrew Muldoon
GARCIA LORCA, FEDERICO (1898–1936)
The best-known poet of the Generation of 1927 was born in Fuentevaqueros, a small town in Granada of a well-to-do family. As a child, he grew up listening to the legends and traditions of Andalusia. A gifted artist, he combined his passion for poetry with music and painting. He studied music under composer Manuel de Falla. His father had opened an account at a local bookstore in Granada and young Federico and brother Paco amassed an impressive library. In Lorca’s youthful autobiography My Village, he recounts his readings of Voltaire’s Candide, Darwin’s Origin of Species, both scandalous at the time, and the classics, such as the Platonic Dialogues, Hesiod’s Theogony, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, about which he later exulted: “It has everything.” During his adolescent years, his readings were more soul-searching: as diverse as the Bible, Saint Teresa’s Life, the poems of Saint John of the Cross, Unamuno’s essays, Hindu philosophy, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis.
Lorca’s first poems were already being recited in the social scene of Granada even before the publication of his early book of prose, Impresiones y paisajes (1918), which expresses his feelings through places visited in Spain. Lorca studied law and in 1919 departed for Madrid to enroll at the elitist Residencia de Estudiantes where he befriended many important artists such as Salvador Dali and film director Luis Bunuel. At the time, the surrealistic movement launched by André Breton projected a revolutionary trend promoting the liberation of the unconscious and the transformation of existing social values. Lorca was also influenced by Charles Baudelaire and the French symbolists Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarmé. Above all at this time, the modernist Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío inspired Lorca’s poetry with exotic imagery, unusual meter, technical virtuosity, and transcendent belief in art and beauty.
The magnetism of his personality and exceptional artistry quickly made Lorca a center of attention in Madrid’s artistic circles. His book El Romancero Gitano (1928),
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inspired by the folklore and landscape of his native Granada, brought him immediate local and international success. Disagreeing with the artistic vanguard mission, Lorca’s reaction is the use of traditional romance or ballads with contemporary poetry. Speaking of a popular Andalusian farce, La zapatera prodigiosa (1926), Lorca declares: “The restless letters I was receiving from my friends in Paris (probably from both Dali and Bunuel), who were engaged in the handsome and bitter struggle to create abstract art, led me to produce this almost banal fable with its direct reality” (Stainton 1999, 148).
Other of Lorca’s traditional sources include the old epics “cantares de gesta” or narrative poems celebrating the exploits of battle; the contributions of poetic schools like the Galician-Portuguese “cancioneros” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the “nanas infantiles” or nursery rhymes of his native region; and the eroticism of Arabic–Andalusian. In a literary world dominated by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Lorca was already acclaimed with international recognition.
In 1929 his visit to the United States inspired his Poeta en Nueva York (1930). He was profoundly affected by this experience and spoke of alienation, minority race issues, and disillusion with modern civilization, expressing his horror in a poetic bizarre juxtaposition of images and metaphors. It is one of the best examples of surrealist poetry in Spanish letters. His avant-garde perception of reality and artistry had also influenced certain American Beat poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
After returning to Spain in 1932, he founded the highly praised La Barraca (The Cabin), an experimental drama company that brought the Spanish Golden Age drama and plays by Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón to the most remote villages in Spain. This initiative was very celebrated during the Spanish Republic.
Inheriting from the Spanish tradition of Arcipreste de Hita, Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora, José Zorrilla, the Duque de Rivas, the popular and the cult, the irrational and the traditional are characteristic of his work. Lorca admired the plastic sensitivity and technical mastery of de Góngora who invents, according to Lorca, “a new method for hunting and shaping metaphors, and thinks, without saying it, that the eternity of a poem depends on the quality and structure of its images.” About another great poet of the Spanish Golden Century, Lorca declares: “Quevedo is Spain.” Distancing from the realism of Jacinto Benavente’s theater, the lyrical and dramatic of Lorca’s trilogy of rural tragedies use fantasy, poetry, music, and ballet to express unrestrained passion in Bodas de Sangre (1933) and frustrated maternity in Yerma (1934). La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936), written a month before his death, mixes honor and the repressed feminine passion. The absurd and the irrational are intertwined with popular values in Andalusia, thus creating a world that explores universal human feelings: freedom versus suppression, hatred and desire, sex and maternity, blood and revenge, foreboding, passion, pride, and superstition. The characters of his plays are gypsies and bullfighters, the Civil Guard, the Spanish peasantry, and the stoic Spanish saints and beatas. The theater is the culmination of his poetry, it is dramatic poetry. Lorca conceived works of daring themes which dramatists such as Tennessee Williams later exploited successfully.
Another inestimable poetic resource for Lorca was el cante jondo. This is a variant of deep song flamenco characterized by a tragic vision of life. Bearing close analogy to the hieratic melodies of India and the primitive Christian chant, cante jondo is a
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