Dictionary of Literary Influences

García Márquez, Gabriel José

gypsy lament and an expression of pagan and sacred religion and art. Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935), his supreme poetic achievement, shows his talent for the musicality, rhythm, and the plasticity of its verses, equaling Lope de Vega’s mastery of the ballad form.

After visiting several Latin American countries, Lorca returned to Spain in 1935. His poetry was radicalized as he began to write about the situation of women and homosexuals. His play El Público was not completely published until 1978. Lorca, a strong advocate for individual freedom and education, was arrested and executed by Spanish fascists during the Civil War (1936–39).

Archives

Fundación García Lorca-Archivo Residencia de estudiantes-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid.

Museo Casa Natal Federico García Lorca, Fuentevaqueros, Granada. Museo García Lorca, Granada.

Printed Sources

Cobb, Carl W. Federico García Lorca (New York: Twayne, 1967).

Delgado, Morales, and Alice J. Poust. Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí: Art and Theory (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001).

Durán, Manuel, and Francesca Collecchia. Essays on Lorca’s Life, Poetry and Theater (New York: P. Lang, 1991).

Gibson, Ian. Federico García Lorca: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 1989).

Johnston, David. Federico García Lorca (Somerset, England: Absolute Press, 1998). MackCurdy, G. Grant. Federico García Lorca: Life, Work, and Criticism (Fredericton, N.B.:

York, 1986).

Predmore, Richard L. Lorca’s New York Poetry: Social Injustice, Dark Love, Lost Faith (Durham: Duke University Press, 1980).

Stainton, Leslie. Lorca: A Dream of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

Andrés Villagrá

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, GABRIEL JOSÉ (1928– )

Born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, a small village in northern Colombia, Gabriel José García Márquez was raised primarily by his grandparents in a large house filled with stories, folklore, and the presence of a large extended family of aunts and uncles. He remained there until the age of eight, when he returned to the house of his mother and father in Sucré. García Márquez was deeply influenced by the years he spent in Aracataca. Regarding his life there, he wrote, “I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents.” While his grandfather served as an “umbilical cord with history and reality,” his grandmother was “the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality” that appears throughout his novels and short fiction.

García Márquez attended boarding school in Baranquilla before winning a scholarship to the Liceo Nacional in Zipaquíra. Upon graduation and at the request of his parents, he enrolled in the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá to study law in 1946. Finding that his studies did not satisfy him, he turned his attention to poetry and writing. He was given a copy of Jorge Luis Borges’s translation of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, and the book transformed him. “I thought to

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myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.” That same year, García Márquez published his first short story, “The Third Resignation,” in the politically left-wing Bogotá newspaper El Espectador, and he immersed himself in reading and writing.

By 1950, García Márquez decided to give up his studies and devote himself fulltime to writing. He returned to Baranquilla and joined a literary circle of writers and artists called el grupo de Baranquilla. Under their influence, García Márquez began to devour the literature of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, and William Faulkner as well as classical writers like Sophocles, whose Oedipus Rex remains one of his favorite works. Influenced heavily by Faulkner’s fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, García Márquez began to envision such a device for his own writing. In 1952, he completed a novella, La hojarasca (Leaf Storm, 1979), which was set in Macondo, a fictional village named after a banana plantation in his home town of Aracataca. The manuscript was initially rejected for publication, and he put it aside. He had found the setting he needed but had not yet found the story.

In 1965, while vacationing in Mexico with his family, García Márquez had a revelation. He spent the next eighteen months writing, and in 1967 he published Cien años de solidad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), a novel deeply imbued with the characters and life of his grandparents’ home in Aracataca, and set in his fictional Maconda. The novel was an instant success and secured his international reputation as a writer of the highest rank. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982.

In his Nobel lecture before the Swedish Academy, García Márquez delivered a politically charged speech that encompassed the breadth of his research into Latin American history and that reflected the influence of his career as a journalist in Colombia and abroad on his writing. He had lived through years of tyranny and corruption, of massacres and assassinations, and of aging tyrants who refused to let go of the reins of power. Images of death, decay, and political obstinacy, expressed in early works like El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976) and La mala hora (In Evil Hour, 1968) continued to inform such later writings as Love in the Time of Cholera, El general en su labertino (The General in His Labyrinth, 1990), Doce cuentos peregrinos (Strange Pilgrims, 1994), and Del amor y otros demonios (Love and Other Demons, 1995).

Archives

No archives yet established.

Printed Sources

Bell, Michael. Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

Bell-Villada, Gene H. García Márquez: The Man and His Work (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

Hahn, Hannalore. The Influence of Franz Kafka on Three Novels by Gabriel García Márquez,

Comparative Cultures and Literatures, vol. 4 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Group, 1994).

Philip Bader

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Garvey, Marcus (Moziah, Jr.)

GARVEY, MARCUS (MOZIAH, JR.) (1887–1940)

Marcus Garvey, champion of American Black identity, was born on August 17, 1887, in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, to racially pure decedents of the Maroons, African slaves who escaped to Jamaica. Young Marcus’s early education ended when he was forced to move to Kingston to be apprenticed to a professional printer. His first effort at social protest came when he led a futile strike of printers in 1907, the failure of which left Garvey with a lifelong distrust of labor unions as voices of the downtrodden. He tried his luck in Costa Rica and Panama, but soon returned to Jamaica where he organized the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League, which he hoped would bring worldwide Negro racial pride and unity.

Marcus Garvey moved to New York in 1916 in an attempt to spread his message of racial pride. By 1919 Garvey had established UNIA chapters in many major American cities. To tie African Americans together, Garvey established the Negro Factories Association, which was owned by Negro stockholders. One of Garvey’s major failures was his inability to establish a Black homeland in Liberia. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1925 for his fund-raising efforts for his Black Star Line shipping company and was sentenced to five years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. His sentence was commuted the same year by President Calvin Coolidge. Garvey moved to London in 1934, where he died on June 10, 1940, at the age of 52.

Although his education was sporadic, Marcus Garvey was a voracious reader. During his first visit to England in the early years of the century, Garvey discovered the edicts of Pan African champion Duse Mohammed Ali in his journal African Times and Orient Review and then soon began working for the publication. However, the works which proved most influential in the development of Marcus Garvey were the sociological works of J. E. Casely Hayford, which introduced him to the concept of African pride and unity, and Booker T. Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery (1900), which argued that anyone could better one’s own life through work. Later, the works of the Black American intellectual and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), W.E.B. DuBois, provided Garvey with ammunition to question the real worth of DuBois and his organization because Garvey felt that neither represented the entirety of America’s Black population.

As strange as it might seem, Garvey utilized the words of such colonial leaders as Patrick Henry to demonstrate how seemingly futile ideas can become central to the founding of a nation or separatist movement. Garvey’s strongest voicing of his philosophy of Black pride is to be found in his two-volume The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923, 1925).

Archives

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, New York City. Fish University Library, Nashville, Tennessee.

The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers Project, James S. Coleman African Studies Center, UCLA. An attempt to gather Garvey papers from numerous other collections.

Printed Sources

Cronon, Edmund David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955). The first scholarly biography of Garvey.

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Garvey, Marcus. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey; or, Africa for Africans, 2 vols., Amy Jacques Garvey (ed.) [1923, 1925] (Dover, Mass.: The Majority Press, 1986). Provides the clearest picture of Garvey’s thoughts.

Hill, Robert A. (ed.). Marcus Garvey, Life and Lessons: A Centennial Companion to the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). A guide for the Garvey Papers.

Tom Frazier

GASPERI, ALCIDE DE (1881–1954)

Alcide de Gasperi was born in Pieve Tesino (Trentino), Austria-Hungary, of middle-class parentage. In 1905 he graduated with a degree in philology at the University of Vienna; six years later, he was elected to the Austrian parliament by the Trentine Catholic regionalist party. After the Trentino was annexed by Italy at the end of the First World War, de Gasperi joined the newly formed Italian Popular Party, won election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1921, and served as the party’s last leader prior to its disbanding in 1926. Accused of clandestine activities and then imprisoned for nine months by the Fascist Regime, de Gasperi was released with Vatican assistance. He spent the next decade working as a librarian at the Vatican and studiously laying the organizational and intellectual foundations for the Christian Democratic party. Much of the party’s postwar program may be traced back to de Gasperi’s Reconstructive Ideas of Christian Democracy, circulated in Rome in July 1943, just after Mussolini’s fall from power. Between December 1945 and July 1953, de Gasperi headed eight successive governments, serving as the Italian Republic’s first, and to this day most durable, prime minister. Relying initially upon Socialist and Communist support, de Gasperi expelled those parties from governing coalitions in 1947. The watershed 1948 elections garnered the Christian Democrats an absolute majority of seats in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Nevertheless, de Gasperi bucked Vatican pressures and retained a multiparty governing coalition with the Social Democrats and several other small, centrist lay parties. A staunch supporter of the Western alliance and NATO, de Gasperi also espoused European federalism. In the eyes of his countrymen, however, de Gasperi was most appreciated for his leadership in reconciling Italy’s Catholic and its liberal, secular national traditions.

His worldview was shaped, appropriately enough, by a combination of traditional Christian and more recent reformist writings—both spiritual and secular. Deeply versed in the scriptures, he habitually scribbled favorite biblical passages in the margins of committee minutes or other official documents. A pessimist by temperament, he was drawn to Job in the Old Testament and to the apostle Paul (especially the Letters to the Romans) in the New. Among the church fathers, St. Augustine exercised the strongest influence on de Gasperi. Like many fellow northern Italians of his day, he revered Alessandro Manzoni’s Risorgimento classic The Betrothed (1825–27). De Gasperi insisted that Catholicism address everyday realities, that it mean more than simple piety and the observation of the sacraments. His understanding of modern industrial and class relations bore the indelible stamp of Catholic Social Teaching, particularly as articulated in Leo XIII’s watershed encyclical Rerum Novarum (1893) and in the writings of progressive Catholic political economist Giuseppe Toniolo.

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De Gasperi understood parliamentary politics as a vocation possessing its own professional standards and ethos. During the quiet decade he spent working at the Vatican library, de Gasperi researched the experience of pioneer Belgian, French, and Austrian Christian Democrats, as well as the German Center Party. He drew on the legacies of these European forerunners, and on the writings of such contemporaries as French neoscholastic Jacques Maritain in refining his own, distinctive political philosophy. De Gasperi’s celebrated 1948 Brussels address, “The Moral Bases of Democracy,” echoed both Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy (1943) and the wartime Christmas radio messages of Pius XII. For all of his personal piety, however, de Gasperi was no integralist: in one biographer’s words, he disliked those who “say their prayers on street corners” (Carrillo 1965, 149). This sensibility contributed in no small measure to the trust he inspired among a broad spectrum of postwar lay political leaders. Even Italian Communist Party chieftain Palmiro Togliatti, writing four years after de Gasperi’s death, acknowledged the unusual “disinterestedness” and personal probity of his erstwhile political nemesis.

Archives

De Gasperi’s personal papers remain closed and in the private custody of family members.

Printed Sources

Andreotti, Giulio. De Gasperi e il suo tempo (Milan: Mondadori, 1954).

Carrillo, Elisa. Alcide de Gasperi: The Long Apprenticeship (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1965). Details de Gasperi’s intellectual debts to Catholic social teaching, especially pp. 106–9 and 170n.

Catti de Gasperi, Maria Romana. De Gasperi, uomo solo (Milan: Mondadori, 1964).

De Capua, Giovanni, (ed.). Processo a de Gasperi: 211 testimonianze (Rome: EBE, 1976).

De Gasperi, Alcide. De Gasperi scrive. Corrispondenza con capi di Stato, cardinali, uomini politici, giornalisti, diplomatici, M. R. Catti de Gasperi (ed.), (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1974).

Durand, Jean-Dominique. “Alcide de Gasperi ovvero la politica ispirata.” Storia Contemporanea 16, 4 (Aug. 1984), 545–91. Documents the sources and significance of de Gasperi’s spirituality.

Scoppola, Pietro. La proposta politica di de Gasperi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1977).

Steven F. White

GATES, WILLIAM HENRY, III (1955– )

Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, the second of three children of William Gates Jr., a Seattle lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates, a schoolteacher and heiress to two successive generations of banking fortunes. Gates was educated at Seattle’s leading prep school, Lakeside, from seventh to twelfth grades. Here, the young software magnate kindled an important and long-lasting friendship with Paul Allen (1953– ), future Microsoft cofounder. Together the two engrossed themselves in computer programming using a computer owned by General Electric and linked to Lakeside via a teletype machine. Eventually, the two subsidized the computer’s expensive rental time fees by developing computer applications for Lakeside and for third parties. After Lakeside, Gates spent two years at Harvard University before taking a leave of absence (that would later become permanent) to form Microsoft with Allen in 1975. Gates was the primary software architect for a number of instrumental computer programming codes including Microsoft’s

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BASIC (Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), and MS DOS, a disk operating software code used by IBM. Gates and Allen expanded on their initial success to build Microsoft into a multi-billion-dollar software empire whose “Windows” software appears on millions of computer desktops worldwide. Other topselling Microsoft programs include “Outlook,” an e-mail application, “Excel,” a spreadsheet tool, and “Internet Explorer,” an Internet browser. As chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft, Gates earned the distinction of becoming the world’s richest man before he reached the age of 40.

Gates has frequently described himself as an avid reader, and his preference for works on the social sciences reflects his secular enlightenment outlook. He has evinced a particular interest in biography, especially the lives of inventors and military leaders. For example, Gates’s own writings have alluded to biographical and autobiographical works of and by the likes of the Wright brothers, Napoleon, the Chinese military strategist Sun-tzu, and Leonardo da Vinci, whose Codex Leicester (ca. 1508), one of 21 da Vinci notebooks known to exist, he purchased for $30.8 million in 1994. In addition, Gates has confessed a penchant for biological texts, especially those having to do with genetics and the workings of the human brain (Gates, New York Times column, 1995). The present-day Microsoft campus is graced with a sizable reading library that Gates frequents assiduously. He regularly reads, and has contributed essays to, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday New York Times, Forbes, USA Today, and his personal favorite, the Economist, as well as other weekly news magazines. One seminal literary influence, often mentioned in writings by and about Gates, was the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. The issue’s feature article on the MITS Altair 8080 computer entitled “World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models” spurred Gates and Allen to develop a simple and user-friendly BASIC program for the computer in keeping with its layman’s appeal. Upon the initial success of the Altair programming venture, inspired by this article, Microsoft was launched (Wallace and Erickson 1992, 67–81). Other noteworthy influences have included Alfred P. Sloane’s My Years with General Motors, which Gates admires for its recounting of Sloane’s objective, factbased management style, and Michael Hammer and James Champy’s Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (rev. ed. New York: HarperBusiness, 1997) which Gates has commended for its advocating of simple, streamlined business processes (Gates 1999, 6–11; 294–97).

Archives

There is no single public repository of Bill Gates’s personal papers. An electronic archive of his essays and speeches may, however, be accessed at: http://www.microsoft.com/ billgates/default.asp.

Printed Sources

“The Bill Gates Interview: a Candid Conversation with the Sultan of Software about Outsmarting his Rivals,” Playboy, July 1994. Gates speaks about his regular weekly and daily reading lists.

Gates, William H., III. Business @ the Speed of Thought (New York: Warner Books, 1999). Reflections by the Microsoft founder on the future of technology and strategies that make businesses succeed.

Gates, William H., III. New York Times column, http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/ columns/pastQ&A.asp. An archive of past Q & A columns written by Gates for the New

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York Times. Several columns from 1995 discuss Gates’s literary influences (1/17/95, 2/15/95, 5/9/95).

Gatlin, Jonathan. Bill Gates: The Path to the Future (New York: Avon Books, 1999). A compilation of biographical information and excerpts from speeches and writings by and about Gates.

Wallace, James, and James Erickson. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (New York: John Wiley, 1992).

Todd Douglas Doyle

GERSHWIN, GEORGE (1898–1937)

George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents on September 26, 1898. His father, Morris, worked at a number of different professions. Rose Gershwin (née Bruskin), George’s mother, was actively involved with Morris in his business pursuits. George spent a good deal of time playing sports and scuffling with his buddies in the streets, often neglecting his schoolwork. One of his first contacts with music was through a talented younger schoolmate, Max Rosenzweig (later known as the violin soloist Max Rosen). George listened attentively to Max’s recital from outside the school building. The Gershwins purchased a piano in 1910 with the intention of providing an instrument for George’s brother Ira to practice on. George impressed his family with his ability to play compositions that he had learned on his own. He began taking piano lessons from a variety of teachers, the most influential being Charles Hambitzer.

Despite Rose’s attempts to steer George into a traditional career path, George left the High School of Commerce in May of 1914. He went to work as a pianist for Jerome H. Remick & Company, an important Tin Pan Alley song publisher. During this time, George developed into an impressive performer. He also began composing songs. In 1919, Gershwin’s first major success was “Swanee,” with lyrics by Irving Caesar. His first Broadway show, La La Lucille, opened on May 26, 1919. At the invitation of Paul Whiteman, Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue for piano and orchestra (1924), his first large-scale work incorporating popular styles with music for the concert hall.

Regardless of George’s lack of interest in school, he became a well-read and cultured musician. While working at Remick’s, Gershwin became acquainted with the songwriter Herman Paley. He attended gatherings in his home, meeting many literary and artistic people. According to Edward Jablonski, Gershwin “was aware of the currents in contemporary music, he attended concerts and recitals of ‘modern’ music, he subscribed to Henry Cowell’s avant-garde quarterly, New Music, collected scores and recordings, with Stravinsky and Sibelius sharing shelf space with Bach, Schubert and Hindemith” ( Jablonski 1987, xi). In his book A Smattering of Ignorance, Oscar Levant reveals that Gershwin’s reading matter included “such standard fact books as the Grove Dictionary and Cobbett’s Cyclopaedic Survey of Chamber Music,” as well as “virtually every worthwhile musical book of his own time, and many older ones” (Levant 1940, 194–95). Gershwin was impressed with DuBose Heyward’s novel Porg y. Working closely with Heyward, Gershwin brought Porg y’s characters to life in his American opera, Porg y and Bess. The opera opened in New York at the Alvin Theater on October 10, 1935.

Perhaps the greatest influence on George’s career was the close relationship that he had with his brother, Ira (1896–1983). In contrast to George, Ira was a student

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and a reader. He had a gift for writing both witty and sentimental song lyrics. Their first collaboration was a tune called “The Rag” in 1918. In Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin, Deena Rosenberg quotes Ira’s description of his working relationship with George: “We are both pretty critical and outspoken, George about my lyrics and I about his music . . .” (Rosenberg 1991, 154). According to their mutual friend, Oscar Levant, “The brightness of Ira’s thought acted as a spur to George’s musical resources and produced many songs that departed from the conventions they had found. They also strongly influenced others” (Levant 1940, 203–4).

Archives

George and Ira Gershwin Collection, Museum of the City of New York.

George Gershwin Memorial Collection, Fisk University.

Gershwin Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

New York Public Library, Music and Theater Divisions.

Printed Sources

Gilbert, Steven E. The Music of Gershwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Jablonski, Edward. Gershwin (New York: Doubleday, 1987).

Kendall, Alan. George Gershwin (New York: Universe Books, 1987).

Kresh, Paul. An American Rhapsody: The Story of George Gershwin. Jewish Biography Series (New York: Lodestar Books–E. P. Dutton, 1988).

Levant, Oscar. A Smattering of Ignorance (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1940).

Peyser, Joan. The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

Rosenberg, Deena. Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin (New York: Dutton-Penguin Books, 1991).

Schneider, Wayne (ed.). The Gershwin Style: New Looks at the Music of George Gershwin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Schwartz, Charles. Gershwin: His Life and Music (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1973).

Marianne Wilson

GHEORGHIU-DEJ, GHEORGHE (1901–1965)

Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was born in Bîrlad, a small town on Romania’s eastern frontier, the son of a laborer. After four years’ elementary schooling, he was apprenticed in various trades before becoming an electrician, working in railway yards in Galat¸i, a large port on the Danube, and Grivit¸a, Bucharest (1916–33; military service 1921–23). His entry into the then-outlawed Romanian Communist Party is not clearly documented but definitely occurred before February 1933, when he was arrested for his involvement in the Grivit¸a railway workers’ strike, the most significant Communist-backed labor protest in interwar Romania. The next 10 years were spent in and out of prisons. In 1936, as one of the few native workingclass Romanian activists, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Party. After the Soviet military occupation of Romania in 1944, he was released from Târgu Jiu internment camp. He was elected secretary-general of the Party from October 1945, held various ministerial posts, and in 1951 became prime minister, following which various purges of the “Muscovite” wing of the Party in Romania

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were organized. Elected president of the State Council in 1961, he held this post until his death in 1965.

An election propaganda article published in the Communist paper Scânteia (The Spark, 8 November 1946), relates that Dej became a communist in 1930 on finding a leaflet lying in the street commemorating the anniversary of a strike. On attending a workers’ meeting, he spoke using the language of the leaflet and was sought out afterward by a party agent. This conversion parable was clearly composed more to inculcate an exemplary model of the effectiveness of propaganda than to convey a historical event. Those who worked closely with Dej have stressed his limited educational horizons in favorable or unfavorable contrast to intellectual or Moscow-trained rivals. His main induction into Marxism-Leninism almost certainly took place in Doftana prison (1938–1944), where Nicolae Ceaus¸escu was also interned; it is also here that he is said to have learned Russian and possibly Yiddish under the instruction of veteran communist Gheorghe Stoica.

His close collaborator and successor as prime minister, Ion Gheorge Maurer, affirmed that Dej had little understanding of Leninism except through Stalin’s ideas, but stressed his shrewdness (Betea 1995, 18). Alexandru Bârla˘deanu, once his economics minister, claimed that Maurer helped Dej write one of his few theoretical publications, O politica˘ româneasca˘ (A Romanian politics, 1944). Romanian communists joked in the 1950s, at the height of efforts to Sovietize the Romanian economic system, that “maybe we should put off the construction of socialism till Gheorghe gets his high-school certificates” (Betea and Bârla˘deanu 1998, 74). However, the same sources also emphasize Dej’s eagerness to “cultivate” himself: he apparently enjoyed the novels of the distinguished critic and writer George Ca˘linescu, namely Bietul Ioanide (Poor Ioanide, 1953) and Scrinul negru (The Black Chest, 1960), which portray the experiences of intellectuals adapting to the new regime (Betea and Bârla˘deanu 1998, 45–46). Paul Sfetcu, his long-serving deputy chef de cabinet, writes that “he read a lot, particularly political literature” without going into more details, but also that he took no particular interest in organizing the display bookshelves in his office.

Archives

Archives of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, National Archives,

Bucharest.

Printed Sources

Betea, Lavinia (interviewer). Maurer ¸is lumea de ieri. Ma˘rturii despre stalinizarea României

(Arad, Romania: Fundat¸ia culturala˘ “Ioan Slavici,” 1995).

Betea, Lavinia (interviewer), and Alexandru Bârla˘deanu. Alexandru Bârla˘deanu despre Dej, Ceaus¸escu ¸is Iliescu (Bucures¸ti: Evenimentul românesc, 1998).

Deletant, Dennis. Communist Terror in Romania: Gheorghiu-Dej and the Police State, 1948–1965 (London: Hurst, 1999).

Sfetcu, Paul. 13 ani în anticamera lui Dej (Bucures¸ti: Fundat¸ia culturala˘ româna˘, 2000). Tisma˘neanu, Vladimir. Fantoma lui Gheorghiu-Dej (Bucures¸ti: Univers, 1995).

Alexander Drace-Francis

GIBRAN, KAHLIL (1883–1931)

A Lebanon-born writer who lived in Boston and New York City for most of his life, Kahlil Gibran is best known as the author of The Prophet (1923), the loosely

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organized tale of a mystic philosopher who speaks in parables. Other notable works include The Broken Wings (1912), A Tear and a Smile (1914), The Madman (1918), Sand and Foam (1926), Jesus, Son of Man (1928), and the posthumous The Garden of the Prophet (1933).

Gibran was born in Bsharri, a Maronite Christian community in what is now modern-day Lebanon. The family emigrated to Boston in 1895. By chance Gibran caught the attention of a number of prominent Bostonians who encouraged and supported the young immigrant. Gibran returned to Lebanon for college. He returned to America after his studies, but personal tragedy struck the young Gibran when he lost his sister, half-brother, and mother all within a few months of his return. Gibran continued to live in Boston, largely supported by his benefactors. After studying abroad in Paris (where he met Auguste Rodin) and London for short durations, Gibran settled permanently in New York City from 1911 until his death in 1931. Gibran never acquired American citizenship, having become involved in Lebanese patriotism and the movement for Lebanese independence from Syria. Upon his death, Gibran willed his personal effects, including his papers, to his hometown of Bsharri, Lebanon.

Gibran naturally gravitated to the introspective and mystic, owing equally to his outsider immigrant status, early family tragedy, and personal inclination. He absorbed a good number of influences, the majority of which seemed to have been American, French, and British writers. Boston’s rich transcendental tradition of Henry David Thoreau (Walden, 1854), Ralph Waldo Emerson (Essays, 1841 and Essays, 1844) and Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, 1855) were both an inspiration for and affirmation of his beliefs. The Belgian writer and dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck (The Treasure of the Humble, 1897), a name more prominent then than now, was an important early influence. Artist-poet-mystic William Blake was a kindred spirit and an influence on the young philosopher-writer. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885) provided the format for Gibran’s Prophet. Other important formative influences included William Butler Yeats, Edward Carpenter, Ernest Renan, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Gibran was more concerned with formulating philosophical ideas in his prose and poetry than crafting fiction. Together with his interest in drawing and painting, his writing makes him a sort of Renaissance man or man-of-letters. Gibran’s influence, based chiefly on The Prophet, grew steadily after his death. Annual sales reached the millions during the 1960s and 1970s and remain strong today.

Archives

Kahlil Gibran Museum in Bsharri, Lebanon.

Printed Sources

Ditelberg, Joshua L. “Kahlil Gibran’s Early Intellectual Life, 1883–1908” (M.A. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1987).

Gibran, Jean, and Kahlil Gibran. Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World (New York: Interlink Books, 1974).

Ostle, Robin. “The Romantic Poets.” In Muhammad M. Badawi (ed.), Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 82–131.

Waterfield, Robin. Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

Charles Allan

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