Dictionary of Literary Influences
.pdfGórecki, Henryk Mikol⁄ aj
positions at the Warsaw Autumn Festivals from 1958 onward led to a national recognition of his musical talent. He won many Polish and international competitions, including UNESCO Composers’ Rostrum (Paris, 1967 and 1973). Unlike his compatriots, Krzysztof Penderecki and Witold Lutosl⁄ awski, Górecki did not travel to conduct and publicize his music abroad; he stayed in Silesia focusing on composition and teaching. Since 1965 he has taught at the PWSM in Katowice; from 1975 to 1979 he became its rector. The rise and fall of the Solidarity movement heightened Górecki’s resolve to withdraw from public life; he settled in the Podhale area of the Tatra Mountains, where he is surrounded by his favorite tradition of Polish folklore (his music features numerous references to the music of this area). The astounding global fascination with the Symphony No. 3 gradually broke this selfimposed exile: in the late 1990s the composer began traveling to receive honorary doctorates (Concordia University, Montreal, 1998; University of Victoria, B.C., 2000) and attend premieres and festivals of his works.
As a composer, he has favored the genres of vocal and vocal–instrumental music for which he carefully selects texts of a religious or deeply personal nature (he is a devoted Catholic who lost his mother at the age of two and suffered several serious illnesses). His music evolved from large-scale avant-garde compositions (Symphony No. 1 “1959”) to rigorously constructed works of a great emotional intensity and sparse musical material, often based on quotations from early music or folksong (Old Polish Music, 1969; Symphony No. 3). The religious inspiration is expressed in a series of monumental pieces to texts including brief fragments of Latin psalms, hymns, or treatises (Symphony no. 2, Copernican, 1972; Beatus vir, 1979; Miserere, 1981). Musical allusions to “Bogurodzica” (Mother of God)—the earliest Polish anthem—permeate Górecki’s oeuvre. Many choral compositions use religious texts (Amen 1975; Totus tuus, 1987) or Polish folk poetry (Szeroka woda, 1979; Wisl–o moja, Wisl–o szara, 1981). Górecki’s fascination with romantic poetry is clearly expressed in the choice of poems for his songs: by Juliusz Sl⁄ owacki (Three Songs, 1956), Cyprian Kamil Norwid (Blessed Raspberry Songs, 1980), and Stanisl⁄ aw Wyspianski (Trzy Fragmenty,1996). Other favorite poets are Maria Konopnicka, Adam Mickiewicz, Kazimierz Przerwa Tetmajer, and Julian Tuwim, whose last words provided the text for Górecki’s Epitafium (1958). The only foreign poet that has inspired the composer is Federico Garcia Lorca, though his poetry appears in Polish translation (Nocturne, 1956; Two Songs, 1980). Górecki’s texts are consistently either in Polish or Latin; he often has used brief fragments, or he coins the needed phrase himself, preferring countless repetitions of one word to extensive texts (Ad Matrem, 1971, and other choral pieces). Finding a suitable phrase sometimes takes years of archival research (for example, the prisoner’s phrase for the second movement of Symphony No. 3). In addition to reading poetry and studying history, Górecki has acknowledged an interest in scholarly writings in the areas of literature, music, and theology. In the latter domain, he has proclaimed a complete faithfulness to the teachings of the pope.
Archives
Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, London office. Press clippings, concert programs, miscellaneous publications, scores, videos, etc.
Górecki’s Personal Archives, village Za˛b, Podhale, Poland (unavailable for study). Manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, library.
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Printed Sources
Droba, Krzysztof. “From Refrain to Beatus Vir, or Concerning Constructivist Reductionism and Expressionism in the Music of Henryk Mikol⁄ aj Górecki.” In Leszek Polony, ed.,
Przemiany techniki dzwiekowej, stylu I estetyki w polskiej muzyce lat 70tych (Krakow: PWM, 1986), 85–97. Based on the author’s 1971, M.A. thesis.
Homma, Martina. “Das Minimale und das Absolute: Die Musik Henryk Mikol⁄ aj Góreckis vor the Mitte der sechziger Jahre bis 1985,” MusikTexte 44 (1992), 40–59. Detailed analysis of Górecki’s major compositions and the main aspects of his style and aesthetics.
Howard, Luke. “‘A Reluctant Requiem:’ The History and Reception of Henryk M. Górecki’s Symphony no. 3 in Britain and the United States” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1997). Extensive study of the phenomenon of the Symphony No. 3, its genesis, content, and detailed reception history, including marketing and music criticism.
Jacobson, Bernard. A Polish Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1996). Popular study, with one chapter on Górecki, with material from interviews and films not available in print.
Thomas, Adrian. Górecki. Oxford Studies of Composers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). The first monograph about the composer, written by an expert in Polish music and a long-time Górecki friend. With detailed analysis of works, annotated list of compositions, discography, and bibliography.
Trochimczyk, Maja (ed.). The Music of Henryk Górecki (Los Angeles: Polish Music Center at USC, forthcoming). Includes interviews with the composer from 1958, 1997, 1998, and 2002.
Maja Trochimczyk
GÖRING, HERMANN WILHELM (1893–1946)
Hermann Göring was born in Rosenheim, Bavaria. Between the ages of 6 and 11, he attended schools near Nuremberg, in Fürth, and in Ansbach. He then enrolled in military school in Karlsruhe, and graduated at 16. He entered an officer’s training school, and upon finishing, served with German land forces. Göring joined the air force in 1915, where he became the successor to Baron Manfred von Richthofen. Göring was later awarded the Iron Cross and the Pour le Mérite. He returned to civilian life, and took courses in political science and history at the University of Munich. Göring met Adolf Hitler around 1921, and by 1922, became a member of the Nazi party. He was proud of his connections with Hitler, and described Mein Kampf as a major influence. Hitler appointed Göring head of the Sturmabteilungen (storm troopers), and on November 9, 1923, Göring led the Munich Putsch. Göring also married his first wife, Baroness Karin von Kantzow, the same year. She died eight years later of tuberculosis. In 1928, Göring was elected to Parliament. In 1933, Hitler appointed Göring as Minister Without Portfolio. Göring held many offices, including Prussian minister of the interior and Reichsminister of the Luftwaffe. In April 1933, Göring founded the Gestapo, designed to suppress all opposition to Nazism. He remained in charge of the Gestapo until 1934. In April 1935, Göring married Emmy Sonnemann, an actress, and in 1938, his only child, Edda, was born. Göring also later ordered the “Aryanization” of all Jewish businesses. In 1939, he was appointed Hitler’s heir and Reichsmarshall. Göring was partially responsible for developing the concentration camps. During the summer of 1941, he authorized Reinhard Heydrich to come up with a Lösung, or solution to the “Jewish question.” After his Luftwaffe failed at plans to invade England, Göring lost favor with Hitler. In May 1945, he was captured by American
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forces and was placed on trial at Nuremberg, where he was found guilty of war crimes, including conspiracy and crimes against humanity. On October 15, 1946, hours before he was scheduled to die by hanging, Göring committed suicide by swallowing a smuggled vial of poison.
After World War I, Göring lacked direction, but Hitler’s Mein Kampf gave him a purpose, both personally and politically. Hitler called Göring, who was influenced by military history, a “Renaissance man” (Fest 1970, 119). Göring read several accounts of Napoleon I, one of which he brought to Hitler’s attention (Göring 1972, 63). He referenced Napoleon in a 1942 speech, where he compared Napoleon’s and Hitler’s Russian campaigns. Göring was also fond of detective novels (Davidson 1966, 93). In addition, books about animals and nature influenced him. He was an animal activist and attempted to ban all vivisection in Germany. In his official biography, which he edited, he was described as having a nightly book hour, during which he read newspapers as well as art and history books (Gritzbach 1973, 197). His private library contained important historical works that dealt with Nordic countries, as well as classic literature and texts that were historically representative of the entire world. Other personal influences include books on German history and military (Gritzbach 1973, 249). While courting Emmy, he bought every book he could find on the theater (Göring 1972, 27). While not all titles of books he read are known, Emmy asserted that Göring had a love of reading, second to his true passion, collecting art. Göring published many of his speeches and wrote a book entitled Aufbau einer Nation. In 1944, he published an atlas, as he was also fond of geography.
Archives
Civilian Agency Records, Records of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas (RG 239) Department of State and Foreign Affairs Records, Washington, D.C.
National Archives and Records Service, Records of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg (RG 238), College Park, Maryland.
Printed Sources
Davidson, Eugene. The Trial of the Germans: An Account of the Twenty-Two Defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966).
Fest, Joachim. The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of Nazi Leadership (New York: Ace Books, 1970).
Göring, Emmy. My Life with Göring (London: David Bruce and Watson, 1972).
Gritzbach, Erich. Hermann Göring: The Man and His Work [1939] (New York: AMS Press, 1973).
Sax, Boria. Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (New York and London: Continuum, 2000).
Wendy A. Maier
GRAHAM, WILLIAM FRANKLIN (1918– )
Billy Graham, the most renowned Christian evangelist in postwar American history, was born near Charlotte, North Carolina, to a devoutly Presbyterian family of Scottish descent. Graham’s formative years were spent on the family’s dairy farm outside of Charlotte, a rural upbringing that he later idealized. He attended Sharon High School, where he was a mediocre student, but a conversion experience at the
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revival meeting of an itinerant preacher named Mordecai Ham changed Graham’s perspective, and he soon decided to pursue a career in the ministry. He entered Bob Jones College in Tennessee in the fall of 1936, before transferring to the Florida Bible Institute in Tampa (1937–40), from which he graduated in 1940. He then furthered his education at Wheaton College in Illinois (1940–43), graduating with an undergraduate degree in anthropology. Graham rose to fame as a result of revival meetings in Los Angeles in 1949 that captured the attention of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Hearst’s coverage of the campaign made Graham a celebrity. Graham adroitly maintained this notoriety during the next five decades as he expanded his evangelistic efforts. He effectively used the mass media through programs such as his “Hour of Decision” radio broadcast and televised revivals in cities around the nation and the world to bring his message to millions of people. Graham also became noted for his frequent meetings with political leaders, including each United States president since Harry S. Truman.
Although Billy Graham demonstrated an active mind throughout his career, his literary influences are narrow, a fact that has often led to the label of a “country preacher.” Graham records that he had been familiar with the Bible “almost since infancy”(Graham 1997, 36), and biblical passages were the most important literary sources for informing his intellectual and cultural outlook. As a boy, Graham also devoured tales about such figures as Tarzan, Tom Swift, Robin Hood, and Zane Grey, although his mother encouraged him to do more serious reading and pressed him to memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism, published by the Presbyterians, as well as an encyclopedia entitled The Book of Knowledge (Graham 1997, 15; see also Martin 1991, 60). As Graham’s intellectual interests matured and as he perceived that he would enter the ministry, he read biographies of Christian preachers and missionaries as well as an abridged edition of the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon’s multivolume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). Yet Graham’s lack of literary breadth appeared to haunt him: he later confessed that he wished he had been more attentive to his studies. Ironically, his own limited literary awareness contributed to the adoption of a simple yet popular evangelistic style that deemphasized the intellectual aspects of Christianity.
Archives
Graham’s papers, which contain numerous documents related to his evangelistic campaigns, are housed at the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.
Printed Works
Aikman, David. Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Country (Nashville: Word, 1998). Barnhart, Joe E. The Billy Graham Religion (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1972). Although
dated, this work is a critical account of Graham’s career, highlighting how he reflected American cultural and intellectual trends in both his personal outlook and ministry.
Frady, Marshall. Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).
Frost, David. Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts (Colorado Springs: Victor Books, 1997). Graham, Billy. Just as I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham (New York: HarperCollins,
1997). Graham’s autobiography contains his recollections of his early literary interests. Martin, William. A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story (New York: William Morrow,
1991).
Pollock, John. Billy Graham: The Authorized Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).
Scott Lupo
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GRAHAM, MARTHA (1894–1991)
Martha Graham—dancer, teacher, choreographer, and founder of American modern dance—was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to George Greenfield Graham, a physician, and Jane Beers Graham. She attended the Cumnock School in Los Angeles from 1913 to 1916 and then became a lead dancer at the Denishawn School of Dancing in Los Angeles under the training of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn from 1916 to 1923. The Martha Graham Dance Group debuted in New York City in 1926 and Graham shortly began her influential career as a teacher and choreographer when she developed the seminal Graham Technique, which centered on the principles of muscular contraction and release. Her long-term collaborations with composer Louis Horst and set designer Isamu Noguchi helped complete the Graham style: angular, sharp, and emotional dances set to modern music amid stark, symbolic sets. In 1932 she was the first dancer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship and began to participate in the Bennington College Summer Dance Program in 1934. In 1937 Graham became the first American dancer to perform at the White House, and her most well known work, Appalachian Spring, for which composer Aaron Copland won the Pulitzer Prize, debuted at the Library of Congress in 1944. In the 1950s, the Graham Company toured under the auspices of the State Department’s Department of Cultural Presentations. Graham was awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom in 1976, was honored for lifetime achievement by the Kennedy Center in 1979, received the French Légion d’Honneur in 1984 and the U.S. National Medal of Arts in 1985. Graham retired from dancing in 1970 but continued to choreograph until her death.
Graham’s influences were diverse, ranging from literature to modern art, and she famously confessed to her Notebooks, “I am a thief—and I am not ashamed. I steal from the best wherever it happens to me—Plato, Pablo Picasso, Bertram Ross . . . I steal from the present and from the glorious past” (Ross 1973, xi). She incorporated into her work a wide selection of subjects, including the Bible and Native American religious rites (Primitive Mysteries, 1931) and American history (Appalachian Spring, 1944). She was often inspired by the work of individuals, including the sermons of Jonathan Edwards (American Document, 1938), the poetry of Emily Dickinson (Letter to the World, 1940) and the lives and novels of the Brönte sisters (Deaths and Entrances, 1943). Works such as Clytemnestra (1958) and Phaedra
(1962) reveal the strong influence of psychology and classical mythology; Graham read Carl Jung, scholarly literature on mysticism, fairy and folk tales, and was greatly influenced by The Masks of God: Occidental Mytholog y (1964), written by her friend Joseph Campbell.
Archives
Martha Graham Archives. Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Printed Sources
De Mille, Agnes. Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (New York: Random House, 1991).
Freedman, Russell. Martha Graham: A Dancer’s Life (New York: Clarion Books, 1998). Graham, Martha. Blood Memory (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
McDonagh, Don. Martha Graham: A Biography (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973).
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Ross, Nancy Wilson (ed.). The Notebooks of Martha Graham (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
Stodelle, Ernestine. Deep Song: The Dance Story of Martha Graham (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984).
Jill Silos
GRAMSCI, ANTONIO (1891–1937)
Antonio Gramsci, Italian socialist political theorist, was born in Ales, in the Sardinian province of Cagliari. Despite family financial difficulties, he successfully graduated from secondary school in Santu Lussurgiu (1908), and from the lyceum in Cagliari. In 1911 he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters in Turin, but quit in 1915 to join the Italian Socialist Party and the editorial staff of L’Avanti. In 1919 he founded the periodical L’Ordine Nuovo with Palmiro Togliatti and other left-wing intellectuals and began to play an important role in the newly created Italian Communist Party. Elected deputy to the Italian parliament after living in Moscow as a delegate to the Communist International (1922–23), he was arrested in 1926 for his anti-Fascist stance despite his parliamentary immunity and died after a 10-year detention in prison and hospital.
A withdrawn youngster with a lively intellectual curiosity, Gramsci spent considerable time reading during his high school years. Benedetto Croce, Gaetano Salvemini, Emilio Cecchi, Giuseppe Prezzolini, and Carolina Invernizio were among his favorite authors. However, he objected to Sardinian writers like Sebastiano Satta and Grazia Deledda for their allegedly sentimental and idealized depiction of their regional reality. Sensitive to the problems of Sardinia, from illiteracy to malaria, starvation, and the terrible conditions of miners, Gramsci felt more attuned to the thought of Karl Marx, which he discovered in this period. Although he did not frequently refer to Marx in his writings until 1917, he already participated in local socialist groups and wrote for newspapers like L’Unione Sarda, urging Sardinia’s independence and emphasizing the need to transcend social and economic differences and to free the masses from ignorance. These issues will become central to L’Ordine Nuovo.
The 1917 Russian Revolution drove Gramsci fully to abandon his contemplative intellectual stance. Vladimir Lenin’s ideas, translated into Italian from French sources, soon overtook the work of Francesco De Sanctis, Friedrich Hegel, Romain Rolland, and Henri Barbusse in Gramsci’s readings, providing the model of a political and economic organization in which the masses act as conscious protagonists. With this more practical and antideterministic attitude to historical change, Gramsci deepened his knowledge of Marx’s texts, complemented by Antonio Labriola’s The Materialist Conception of History, hence setting the premises of the most mature phase of his political thought, that of the prison years.
In his posthumous letters and Prison Notebooks, Gramsci resolutely opposed one of his earlier literary models, Benedetto Croce, denouncing him as a reactionary and bourgeois intellectual and investigated the aesthetic, philosophical, and moral standards necessary to the creation of a proletarian civilization. The need for a connection between intellectuals and the working masses sparked Gramsci’s notion of a “national-popular” culture that would lead to an independent working-class
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worldview. In the rich array of books that Gramsci received in prison thanks to the economist Piero Sraffa, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince was pivotal. It provides Gramsci with insights into “hegemony,” which, unlike the coercive strategy of “domination,” is for him a political power legitimized by the intellectual and moral consensus of a system of class alliances expressing a collective will. The relationship that Gramsci established between Machiavelli and Marx revealed to him that the success of the socialist revolution depended less upon a direct attack on the state than upon its ability to undermine the ideology of the ruling class.
Archives
Archivio Fondazione Istituto Gramsci, Rome, Italy. Letters, Prison Notebooks, photographs, documents about Gramsci’s university years and trials.
Printed Sources
Davidson, Alastair. Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography (London: Merlin Press, 1977).
Dombroski, Robert S. Antonio Gramsci (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989).
Gramsci, Antonio. Letters from Prison, Frank Rosengarten (ed.), Raymond Rosenthal (transl.), (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
———. Vita attraverso le lettere (1908–1937), Giuseppe Fiori (ed.), (Torino: Einaudi, 1994). Sassoon, Ann Showstack (ed.). Approaches to Gramsci (London: Writers and Readers, 1982).
Nicoletta Pireddu
GREENE, HENRY GRAHAM (1904–1991)
Born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Greene attended the school where his father served as headmaster and then went to Balliol College, Oxford, after which he worked for the Nottingham Journal. There he met Vivien Dayrell-Browning, whom he later married (1927; although never divorced, they separated in 1948) and through whom he was introduced to the Catholic Church, into which he was received in 1926. From 1926 to 1930 he worked as a subeditor for the London Times, leaving that position to devote full time to his writing, although he continued as a film critic (1935–39) and literary editor (1940–41) for The Spectator. His popular The Man Within appeared in 1929. A long series of over 60 “entertainments” and serious novels followed thereafter along with intermittent journalistic pieces, screen-writing and other cinematography, autobiographical works, and extensive travel writing, including Stamboul Train (1932), It’s a Battlefield
(1934), England Made Me (1935), Journey Without Maps (1936), and A Gun For Sale
(1936).
Greene’s first major novel, Brighton Rock, was published in 1938. During the Second World War he worked for the Secret Service in Sierra Leone, and the nature of his work can be noted in different ways in The Lawless Roads (1939), The Confidential Agent (1939), The Ministry of Fear (1943), The Third Man (1950), The Quiet American (1955), and Our Man in Havana (1958). Clearly among his best works are The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and A Burnt-Out Case
(1961).
Following the war he served as director of Eyre & Spottiswoode publishers in London (1944–48) and director of Bodley Head publishers, London (1958–68). In 1954 he was the Indo-China correspondent for The New Republic (1954). Other
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major novels, travel books, and autobiographical reflections followed from the 1960s on, including In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (1961), A Sense of Reality (1963), The Comedians (1966), Travels with My Aunt (1969), A Sort of Life (1971), The Honorary Consul (1973), Ways of Escape (1980), and Monsignor Quixote
(1982).
Like Evelyn Waugh, his contemporary and the British Catholic convert novelist with whom he is regularly linked, Greene was most influenced by his own immediate experience: his travel, his wartime service (in Greene’s case, unlike Waugh’s, his work in espionage), his Catholicism, and his literary and other personal associations. His wide-ranging reading, reviews, and comments on authors he admired makes it difficult to narrow the range of those authors who had the greatest impact on his work. Certainly H. Rider Haggard’s (1856–1925) novels had an early attraction for him, as he noted in his autobiography, and the psychoanalytic help and friendship of Kenneth Richmond (and his wife Zoe), who introduced him to dream analysis and encouraged him in his literary pursuits, cannot be ignored. At Balliol College, Oxford, he gained an interest in drama (which would blossom throughout his life in close study and knowledge of the cinema and his use of cinematic techniques in his writing; the figure of Mae West, for example, in Brighton Rock’s Ida) and an early attraction to espionage is marked in undergraduate trips to Ireland and Germany. By 1923 he spoke of himself as being “converted to Sitwellianism,” and in 1925 joined the Communist Party, although his attraction to Vivien at the time and his resulting growing interest in Catholicism redirected his formal Marxist ideology.
On a trip to visit fellow party members in Paris he purchased a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but he was much more firmly drawn to T. S. Eliot and Herbert Read (“the two great figures of my young manhood” [Ways of Escape, 33]), and his work and his autobiographical reflections indicate the far greater influence of Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) on his early thought and style. Among the critical work which he cites as important for him is Percy Lubbock (The Craft of Fiction, 1921), and noteworthy as well was the wide range of writers and artists he knew through the Lady Ottoline Morrell circle, members of which he used as models for characters in his writing. (Note in particular Morrell herself as Lady Caroline and John Middleton Murray as Mr. Surrogate in It’s a Battlefield.) The list of writers established by Duran in his Graham Greene (“Literature and the Nobel Prize,” 43–53) is too general to be of great use in establishing influences, though it does support some of Greene’s own reflections, particularly in its placement of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as first in Greene’s list of the best novels he knew, a positioning supported in Greene’s “Some Famous Writers I Have Known” dream diary, A World of my Own (1992).
Much of the influence to be traced in his work is marked primarily in the individual compositions themselves and not greatly beyond them. Thus one may suggest that his reflections on the nature of evil generally may be shaped by the work of Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913), but it is more useful to narrow the perspective in individual cases and note, for example, the importance of a work like that of Father Wilfrid Parsons, Mexican Martyrdom (1936) and the place of the historical martyr, Padre Miguel Pro (1891–1927), in the case of The Power and the Glory than to seek some more complex philosophical or theological source in contemporary British Catholic figures such as Bede Jarret (1881–1934).
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Archives
Georgetown University, Special Collections, Lauinger Library: correspondence and papers. Boston College Libraries: residual library and archives.
University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Library: Manuscript of The Power and the Glory.
Reading University Library: 1963–78; letters (52) to the Bodley Head Ltd. Pierpont Morgan Library: 1945–55; letters (62) to Herbert Greene.
National Library of Wales, Department of Manuscripts and Records: 1940–88; correspondence with Emyr Humphreys.
Oxford University, Bodleian Library, Special Collections and Western Manuscripts: 1977–78; letters to Jack Lambert, with Lambert’s interview, notes.
British Film Institute: 1968–74; correspondence with Joseph Losey.
Sussex University Library Special Collections: 1958–65; correspondence with New Statesman magazine.
London University, University College London (UCL) Manuscripts Room; 1943–59: letters from Mervyn Peake.
Printed Sources
Bloom, Harold (ed.). Graham Greene (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987).
Couto, Maria. Graham Greene: On the Frontier: Politics and Religion in the Novels (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
Duran, Leopoldo. Graham Greene (London: HarperCollins, 1994).
Gorra, Michael Edward. The English Novel at Mid-century: From the Leaning Tower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
Meyers, Jeffrey (ed.). Graham Greene: A Revaluation: New Essays (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
Pendleton, Robert. Graham Greene’s Conradian Masterplot: The Arabesques of Influence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Sharrock, Roger. Saints, Sinners and Comedians: The Novels of Graham Greene (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1984).
Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene, 3 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989– ) West, W. L. The Quest for Graham Greene (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997).
Peter C. Erb
GRIFFITH, DAVID WARK (1875–1948)
Born on a farm in Floydsfork, near Crestwood in Oldham County (Kentucky) on January 22, 1875, D. W. Griffith is known as the director of epic, flamboyant silent movies such as Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), and the melodrama Broken Blossoms (1919). Griffith was raised as a Methodist and later became freemason (Schickel 1984, 33). Actor Ralph Graves described Griffith as slightly illiterate and “a bit of a humbug” (quoted in Schickel 1984, 412). Griffith’s father died when David was 10, forcing him to leave primary school early. Among many jobs, Griffith sold newspapers in Louisville when he was 14 and four years later was clerk at Flexner’s Book Store. He began touring in New York and New England as an actor in 1902, playing roles in The Gypsy Cross and later in Miss Petticoats (the latter from a novel by Dwight Tilton; Schickel 1984, 62). In Oakland, California, in 1906, Griffith had a huge success in Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. One of the cofounders of United Artists (1919), Griffith is sometimes known as “the man who invented Hollywood.” After his first film, a short titled The Adventures of Dollie (1908), he directed
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more than 450 movies (many now lost), mostly shorts (one or two reels), and all silent with the exception of Abraham Lincoln (1930) and his last, The Struggle (1931). Although he was much criticized for his reactionary ideas, even in his most famous films Griffith is nevertheless recognized as the filmmaker who from 1908 invented narration modes and visual techniques such as “cross-cutting” (The Fatal Hour, 1908; The Lonely Villa, 1909), and “fade-outs,” still used in today’s movies.
Edmund Rucker recalls that young Griffith occasionally went to the Polytechnic Library where he read Dickens (whom he admired above all), and also “Browning, possibly Tolstoy and even Hardy, as well as Civil War history” (Schickel 1984, 41). Griffith often acknowledged that Dickens was the master of efficient storytelling, and later adapted The Cricket on the Hearth to film (1909; Schickel 1984, 113). Among newspapers, Griffith’s parents would read Leslie’s Weekly (Schickel 1984, 27). Griffith was much influenced by a popular book, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903), showing a mythical portrait of the nation as it would appear in Birth of a Nation (1915; Schickel 1984, 66). On stage, in 1905, Griffith played a role in an adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel, Ramona, which he later filmed. Many Griffith films were adapted from American history and from numerous novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Guy de Maupassant, Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dickens, and many playwrights. He directed Resurrection (1909) from Tolstoy, The Death Disc (1909) from Mark Twain, and A Corner in Wheat (1909) from Frank Norris’s A Deal in Wheat. Griffith adapted Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Enoch Arden on three different occasions. Griffith also had a strong identification with Edgar Allan Poe (Schickel 1984, 56), adapting The Avenging Conscience (1914). While Griffith admired Walt Whitman, he found Voltaire “rather too cynical” (Schickel 1984, 194). Griffith also appreciated the tale “The Chink and the Child,” in Thomas Burke’s bestseller Limehouse Nights (1917), adapted as Broken Blossoms (1919). From 1920, Griffith declared he wanted to make only films adapted from “the theatrical and literary classics of his time,” but these were all failures (Schickel 1984, 425). As a pioneer, D. W. Griffith was admired by the most important film directors, including Sergei Eisenstein,
John Ford, Orson Welles, and François Truffaut.
Archives
D. W. Griffith Papers. Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Includes manuscripts, unpublished writings, Griffith Corporation scrapbooks, correspondence. Most of this has been reproduced on 36 reels of microfilm. See D.W. Griffith Papers, 1897–1954: A Guide to the Microfilm Edition. Produced by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, Microfilming Corporation of America, Sanford, North Carolina. Sanford, N.C: The Corporation, 1982.
United Artists Archives (and Paramount Archives), at the Wisconsin Center for Theatre Research, Madison, Wisconsin. Official papers and contracts.
Printed Sources
Barry, Iris (ed.). D. W. Griffith: American Film Master [1940] (New York: Museum of Modern Art, distributed by Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1965).
Griffith, D. W. The Man Who Invented Hollywood; The Autobiography of D. W. Griffith, James Hart (ed.), (Louisville: Touchstone Pub. Co., 1972).
Schickel, Richard. D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). By far the best biography of Griffith.
Yves Laberge
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