Dictionary of Literary Influences

Hasˇek, Jaroslav

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published his first short story featuring Svejk (pronounced “Shvake”), basing his tale on the experiences of friends in the Austro-Hungarian army. Hasˇek himself joined the army in January 1915 and was captured on the Russian front in September of that year. He later joined the Czechoslovak Legion, formed in Russia of prisoners- of-war, and served as a propagandist for the unit. After the October Revolution in 1917, he turned to the Bolsheviks and held various official positions in Siberia and central Asia. In 1920 he returned to Prague, planning to take part in a Communist revolution that was aborted before his arrival. Branded a Bolshevik and a traitor to

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the Czech national cause, Hasˇek turned to Svejk to make ends meet, publishing in

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1921 the first volume of The Fortunes of the Good Soldier Svejk in the Great War (Osudy

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dobrého vojáka Svejka za sveˇtové války). He completed three volumes of the novel before his death due to alcoholism.

Hasˇek was a naturally gifted writer who would write and submit hundreds of pages without making an edit. His literary efforts owed more to his remarkable abilities of observation and mimicry than to any influential author or style. He was neither a devoted reader of literature nor a habitué of any literary circle, although he was friends with other Prague artists, such as cartoonist Josef Lada (1887–1957),

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who completed a famous series of illustrations of scenes from Svejk, and playwright Frantisˇek Langer (1888–1965), with whom he collaborated on various satiric projects. Hasˇek was a wide-ranging reader whose writings do make direct and indirect references to other literary works. Hasˇek drew from, commented upon, and often satirized a variety of sources, from newspapers, political journals, humor magazines, and pulp novels to sacred texts and classic works of literature. The Good Sol-

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dier Svejk cites some twenty Czech, German, and Hungarian periodicals; historical, philosophical, and psychiatric studies; the New Testament and Indian sacred texts; the works of François Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, and William Shakespeare; and those of Aleksandr Pushkin, Heinrich Heine, and Victor Hugo. One example of these literary references is at the close of part I, chapter 12, when the military chaplain, Otto Katz, falls asleep with the Decameron by Boccaccio (1313–75) in his hands. These references indicate that Hasˇek was familiar with a variety of classic literary works, and both scholars and contemporary critics, including the Prague critic Max Brod (1884–1968), have commented upon the parallels between Hasˇek’s

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Svejk and other texts, such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, and The Pickwick Papers of Charles Dickens (1812–70).

Archives

Archive of the National Literature Museum, Prague, Czech Republic: Jaroslav Hasˇek Collec-

tion (8 boxes); correspondence, manuscripts of The Good Soldier ˇvejk and other prose and

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poetry, photographs.

Printed Sources

Gaifman, Hana Ari. “Problems and Issues in Hasˇek’s The Adventures of the Good Soldier

ˇ vejk.” In Walter Schamschula (ed.), Proceedings of the International Hasˇek Symposium

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(Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1989).

Parrott, Cecil. The Bad Bohemian: The Life of Jaroslav Hasˇek, Creator of the Good Soldier ˇ vejk

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(London: The Bodley Head, 1978).

Jaroslav Hasˇek: A Study of ˇ vejk and the Short Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

———. S versity Press, 1982).

Bruce R. Berglund

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Hauptmann, Gerhart

HAUPTMANN, GERHART (1862–1946)

Gerhart Hauptmann was born at Obersalzbrunn (today’s Bad Salzbrunn), Germany. After elementary school, Hauptmann entered into junior high school at Zwinger/Breslau but left school in 1878 to learn farming with his uncle Gustav Schubert. In 1880 he was accepted at the Breslau School for Arts to become a sculptor. A year later, Hauptmann became engaged to Marie Thienemann, a wealthy merchant’s daughter and, financially secure, he began to study history at the University of Jena (1880–83). After traveling around southern Europe, Hauptmann settled in Rome in 1883, where he intended to live and work as a sculptor. However, he was forced to go back to Germany in 1883 when he suffered a lifethreatening typhus infection. Hauptmann married Marie in 1885 and they decided to move to Erkner, a town near Berlin, as he wanted to live close to his artistic friends. In 1885, Hauptmann began writing the epos Promethidenlos, poetry, and his novellas Fasching (1887) and Bahnwärter Thiel (1887). His naturalistic play Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Daybreak) made Hauptmann instantly famous in 1889. The highly critical social drama Die Weber was based on the brutal suppression of the revolting Silesian weavers in 1844 and caused an enormous scandal in Berlin in 1892. His biggest success as a dramatist was his rather uncontroversial fairy-tale- like Die versunkene Glocke (1896). In 1912, Hauptmann was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

During his one-year apprenticeship on a farm in Silesia, Hauptmann came under the influence of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700–60), one of the leaders of German pietism in the eighteenth century. His verse epos Promethidenlos (1885) alludes to Lord Byron’s style and tone. The dogmatic leader of the German naturalist movement, Arno Holz, was personally involved in Hauptmann’s writing of Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889). Hauptmann, however, distanced himself from Holz and was much more indebted to Henrik Ibsen’s social dramas. Vor Sonnenaufgang was clearly inspired by Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1884) and Das Friedensfest (The Coming of Peace, 1890) was influenced by Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) and Rosmersholm (1886). In his novella, Der Apostel (1890), Hauptmann incorporated motives from Georg Büchner’s novella Lenz (posthumously published in 1839) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (1868–69). Hauptmann based his play Elga (1896) on Friedrich Grillparzer’s Das Kloster bei Sendomir (1827). In 1922, Hauptmann published the story “Phantom. Aufzeichnungen eines ehemaligen Sträflings,” which resembles Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). In his later years, Hauptmann considered himself a true successor of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and frequently alluded to Goethe’s oeuvre. In the 1920s and 1930s, Hauptmann also evoked various works by Shakespeare in Die Insel: Paraphrase zu Shakespears “Sturm” (1920), Hamlet in Wittenberg (1928), Die goldene Harfe (1933), and Im Wirbel der Berufung (1936). Hauptmann’s epos Der große Traum (1942) was influenced by Dante’s Divine Comedy (1310–14).

Archives

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany: Largest collection of Hauptmann’s manuscripts and his entire unpublished works.

Gerhart-Hauptmann-Museum, Erkner, Germany: Some of Hauptmann’s manuscripts and correspondence.

University of Wroclaw, Poland: Smaller collection of Hauptmann’s correspondence.

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Havel, Václav

Printed Sources

Hilscher, Eberhard. Gerhart Hauptmann: Leben und Werk (Frankfurt: Athäneum, 1988). Hoefert, Sigfrid. Das Drama des Naturalismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993).

Marx, Friedhelm. Gerhart Hauptmann (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998).

Maurer, Warren R. Understanding Gerhart Hauptmann (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992).

Osborne, John. Gerhart Hauptmann and the Naturalist Drama (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1998).

Poppe, Reiner. Gerhart Hauptmann: Leben und Werk (Husum: Husum, 1998).

Tschörtner, H. D., and Sigfrid Hoefert. Gespräche und Interviews mit Gerhart Hauptmann (1894–1946) (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1994).

Gregor Thuswaldner

HAVEL, VÁCLAV (1936– )

Václav Havel was born in Prague into a wealthy family. After the Czechoslovak Communist Party gained power in 1948, his family’s status was a strike against him. Barred from the Academy of Performing Arts, Havel studied at a technical university and served in the army before gaining work in 1960 at Prague’s Theater on the Balustrade. He soon became the theater’s principal playwright, authoring absurdist dramas, such as The Garden Party (1962), The Memorandum (1965), and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968), that subtly criticized the communist regime. In 1968 Havel turned to politics, writing speeches and articles in support of the reform program of Alexander Dubcˇek. Following the Soviet invasion in August 1968, Havel was denounced for his political activities. He found work in a brewery and continued to write, although his plays could only be staged secretly in Czechoslovakia. In 1975 Havel wrote the first of his political essays: a letter to President Gustav Husák (1913–91) decrying the stagnation of Czechoslovak culture. Two years later he and philosopher Jan Patocˇka drafted Charter 77, which criticized the regime for failing to protect human rights. In the following years, Havel was arrested on several occasions for his dissident activities, and between 1977 and 1989 he spent a total of five years in prison. During one term in prison (1979–82), Havel engaged in a correspondence with his wife and his younger brother, Ivan, which was published later as Letters to Olga (1984). Havel also wrote criticisms of the regime that were published in samizdat, most notably his essay “Power of the Powerless” (1978), as well as the plays Largo Desolato (1984) and Temptation (1986). In November 1989 he was the leading figure in Civic Forum, which negotiated with the regime while hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of Prague. Following the government’s collapse, Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989. He led the country through the initial years of transition, resigned in 1992 in protest against the proposed split of Czechoslovakia, and took office as president of the Czech Republic in January 1993. As head of state in a parliamentary system, Havel exercised little political power in the 1990s.

As a playwright, Havel is often grouped with the absurdist writers Eugene Ionescu and Samuel Beckett. Havel did read both authors, and his early dramatic work for the Theater on the Balustrade demonstrates their influence, particularly in presenting dehumanized characters. Havel also admired the leading Czech writ-

ers of the 1920s, ˇ and and he had a great affinity for

Karel Capek Jaroslav Hasˇek,

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Hayek, Friedrick August von

the other leading Prague literary figure of that period, Franz Kafka. The clearest statement of Havel’s personal philosophy is in the volume Letters to Olga. In the letters, Havel explains his belief in Being, a transcendent absolute that Havel describes in various instances as “the order of existence” and “the final horizon.” Although Havel’s Being has similarities to a personal God, he refuses to describe it as such. Havel admits admiration for religious believers; however, he denies any orthodox belief or religious affiliation. Rather, the primary influence on Havel’s notion of Being was the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Havel read Heidegger in prison, he quotes the philosopher in Letters to Olga, and he employs Heideggerian terms in his writings: “Being” (Sein), “existence in the world” (Dasein), and “thrownness” (Geworfenheit). Havel’s philosophy is also based upon the work of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocˇka, who viewed ideology as another ill-used product of the rationalism of the modern era. Rather than following the “totalizing untruths” of party doctrines or ideologies, Havel urges people to “live in truth,” a concept taken from Patocˇka. In his actions as president, Havel has cited as a model the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomásˇ G. Masaryk. Masaryk based his politics on morality, Havel stated in his first New Year’s address as president; “Let us try in a new time and a new way to restore this concept of politics” (Havel 1991, 395).

Archives

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Josef Skvorecky´ Collection, Hoover Institution of War, Peace, and Revolution, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. Correspondence between Havel and his North American

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publisher, Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky´.

Archive of the Coordinating Committee of Civic Forum, Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic.

Printed Sources

Findlay, Edward F. “Classical Ethics and Postmodern Critique: Political Philosophy in Václav Havel and Jan Patocˇka,” The Review of Politics, 61, 3 (1999), 403–39.

Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa, and Phyllis Carey (eds.). Critical Essays on Václav Havel (Boston: Twayne, 1999).

Havel, Václav. Letters to Olga: June 1979–September 1982, Paul Wilson (trans.), (New York: Henry Holt, 1989).

———. Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990, Paul Wilson (trans.), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).

Keane, John. Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Sire, James. Václav Havel, The Intellectual Conscience of International Politics: An Introduction,

Appreciation, and Critique (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2001).

Bruce R. Berglund

HAYEK, FRIEDRICK AUGUST VON (1899–1992)

Friedrick von Hayek was born in Vienna, Austria. He came from a family of intellectuals; his father and both his grandfathers were published scholars. Hayek studied at the University of Vienna (1918–23), earning degrees in law and political science, and spent a year at New York University while attending lectures at Columbia University (1923–24). Hayek, along with such future intellectuals as Fritz Machlup, Eric Vögelin, and Gottfried Haberler, attended the biweekly “private seminars” organized and led by Ludwig von Mises from 1924 to 1931. Dur-

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Hayek, Friedrick August von

ing this time, with the assistance of Mises, Hayek founded and directed the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research (1927). He later became a lecturer in economics at the University of Vienna (1929–31). Hayek then took a faculty position as the Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics, London School of Economics (1931–50). In 1947, Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society and served as president for twelve years, bringing together intellectuals to exchange ideas regarding the nature of a free society. Later, Hayek was professor of Social and Moral Science in the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago (1950–62) and then professor at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany (1962–68). In 1974, Hayek shared the Nobel Prize in economic science with Gunnar Mydral. Hayek is considered to have played a key role in the twentiethcentury revival of classical liberalism. Hayek’s ideas are at the forefront of the movement toward a society based on freedom and the rule of law and away from society based upon the arbitrary control of central government.

Hayek describes the major influences in his precollegiate life, aside from his family, as drama and theater. He read seventeenthand eighteenth-century Spanish and French dramas, although Hayek considered Goethe the greatest literary influence on his early thinking (Ebenstein 2001, 13). During Hayek’s service in World War I he read socialist pamphlets and was led to his early Fabian Socialist views by the writings of Walter Rathenau. During his first year at the University of Vienna, Hayek’s major interest was philosophical psychology (the nature of human mental understanding of the physical world). The physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (Analysis of Sensations, 1914) influenced Hayek’s thinking, stimulating the ideas that were published in The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psycholog y (1952). Another strong influence on Hayek’s research was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Tractatus influenced not only the style and substance of The Sensory Order, but also Hayek’s picture of science and knowledge (see, for example, his essays in Collectivist Economic Planning [1935]).

After his first year at the University of Vienna, Hayek’s interests turned to economics, and he credits Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Barwerk and Friedrick von Wieser (the founders of the Austrian school of economics) as exerting the greatest intellectual influence on him. Wieser represented the more corporatist and intervention-oriented branch of the Austrian perspective and thus attracted the early Fabian Hayek. Hayek was later introduced to the writings of Menger and considered Principles of Economics (1871) and Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences (1883) as crystallizing much of his thinking. Although Wieser would advise his thesis, Hayek came to work with Ludwig von Mises (who represented the Böhm-Barwerk anti-intervention branch). The time spent and the intellectual stimulation accorded by Mises’s private seminar was vital to Hayek’s scholarly development. Hayek also considered Mises’s book Socialism (1951) as one of the two most influential books he had ever read (the other was Menger’s Principles). Through Mises’s assistance Hayek spent a year at the New York University and was influenced by Wesley Clair Mitchell.

In his professional career Hayek noted the influence of his tenure at the London School of Economics and the importance of his shared seminar with Lionel Robbins in advancing his economic views (Ebenstein 2001, 47). Karl Popper was another person who deeply influenced Hayek. One of the ongoing debates among

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Hayek scholars is the role of Popper in influencing Hayek’s methodological leanings. This debate aside, there is no doubt Hayek acknowledges an intellectual debt to Popper, especially Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Throughout his career Hayek balanced his empirical training with his normative theoretical leanings. An examination of Hayek’s four major works of societal philosophy—The Road to Serfdom; The Constitution of Liberty; Law, Legislation and Liberty; and The Fatal Conceit— reveals that the most cited individuals are David Hume, Adam Smith, J. S. Mill, Popper, and Mises.

Archives

Register of the Friedrich A. von Hayek Papers, 1906–92. Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, California.

UCLA Oral History Program, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library: a valuable collection of interviews with Hayek.

The University of Salzburg, in Austria, purchased Hayek’s personal library in 1969. It still owns the collection.

Printed Sources

Ebenstein, Alan. Friedrick Hayek: A Biography (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

Hennecke, Hans Jörg. Friedrick August von Hayek. Die Tradition der Freiheit (Düsseldorf: Wirtschaft und Finanzen, 2000).

Kresge, Stephen, and Leif Wenar (eds.). Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiological Dialogue

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Craig T. Cobane

HEANEY, SEAMUS (1939– )

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry, Northern Ireland, at “Mossbawn,” the family farm. He is the eldest of nine children in a Catholic family. His cultural surroundings and awareness of the political divide between Anglo-Protestant domination and the native Irish land left an indelible imprint on his poetry. He was a boarder at St. Columb’s College, Derry (1957–61) and studied English at Queen’s University, Belfast (1957–61). After obtaining his Teacher Training Diploma (1962), he got his first teaching post in Belfast. During this period he came in contact with Irish poets and began writing himself. His first collection, Death of a Naturalist, appeared in 1966, followed by Door into the Dark (1969) and Wintering Out

(1972). His poetry sold well and received widespread praise; gradually assuming the role of public poet, he spent in 1970–71 his first year abroad at Berkeley. In 1972, he relocated to Glanmore in the Irish Republic. This event marked an important turning point in his writing, because it was accompanied with feelings of guilt for fleeing the political “troubles” of Northern Ireland; he considered himself a writer in exile and identified with William Wordsworth, whose sojourn in Dove Cottage at Grasmere and writing of the Prelude followed political disillusions. Around the same period North (1975) was published, a book of poetry that, like its successor Field Work (1979), confronted the social and political situation in Northern Ireland. In 1984 Heaney was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard. From 1988 to 1994 he was professor of poetry at Oxford. In the intervening years he published Station Island and Sweeney Astray (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), and Sweeney’s Flight (1992). His most recent publications include The

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Spirit Level (1996), a translation of Beowulf (1999), and Electric Light (2001). In 1995 Heaney received the Nobel Prize.

Heaney’s influences can mostly be gleaned from explicit allusions in his poetry, from interviews, and from his essays, particularly the volumes Preoccupations (1980) and The Government of the Tongue (1988); he has made translations from Dante, Sophocles, and Beowulf. In Station Island (1984) he defines influence as the dilemma between guiding and being guided: while the modern poet seeks guidance from his predecessors, he ultimately needs to reshape his models to forge an original poetic voice. The development of Heaney’s poetry reflects the legacy of two literary traditions: one is specifically Anglo-Irish (W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh), coupled to an acute awareness of the language and speech patterns as he experienced them in Northern Ireland; the other is English and cosmopolitan (including Thomas Wyatt, William Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Dante, Anton Chekhov, Osip Mandelstam, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz), and served Heaney to see the familiar and the local as part of a wider poetic horizon. The influence of Dante and other exilic poets like Herbert and Milosz hinges on the delicate balance between poetic autonomy and political engagement and concerns the problem of reconciling the poet’s independence with public responsibility. Heaney invokes Wordsworth’s political disillusionment to elucidate the problem of the poet’s spiritual alienation either from himself or from the world in Place and Displacement (1984), and in the pastoral “Glanmore Sonnets” (1975); the “spots of time” feature as a technique of memory in Stations (1975). The most obvious use of Dante appears in Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984)—noted for its presence of the Inferno and Purgatorio interwoven with a pilgrimage to Saint Patrick’s Purgatory—and The Spirit Level (1996). The archeological element in Heaney that sees historical memory preserved in the native soil found its inspiration from P. V. Glob’s The Bog People (1969), a study of ritual sacrifice in prehistorical Jutland.

Archives

None currently available.

Printed Sources

Buttell, Robert. “Seamus Heaney.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 40: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, since 1960, Part I (Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1985), 179–201. Still the most complete biographical sketch to date; others can be found in interviews and various introductory volumes to Heaney’s poetry.

Corcoran, Neil. After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Traces the literary legacy of Yeats and Joyce through twentiethcentury Irish literature, including their influence on Beckett, Kinsella, Friel, and Heaney.

Garret, Robert F. (ed.). Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995). Contains a section on “Poetic Contexts” with essays on “Heaney and Dante” by Carla De Petris; “The Poet as Archeologist: W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney,” by Jon Stallworthy; “Irish Poetry after Joyce (Heaney and Kavanagh),” by Dillon Johnston; and “Orthodoxy, Independence, and Influence in Seamus Heaney’s Station Island,” by Carolyn Meyer.

———. Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Places Heaney within the context of the Irish literary tradition, particularly its attempt to forge a cultural identity, and discusses Heaney’s own uncertainties about his place in that tradition.

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Hart, Henry. Seamus Heaney: Poet of Contrary Progressions (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992). The chapter on “Ghostly Colloquies” reviews the literary personae who feature in Heaney’s poetry as guides or as travelers on their exilic night journeys.

Molino, Michael R. Questioning Tradition, Language, and Myth: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney

(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994). A detailed analysis of tradition and identity in Heaney’s work with particular reference to Anglo-Irish literature and the Field Day company.

Morrison, Blake. Seamus Heaney (London: Methuen, 1982). An introduction to Heaney’s work that places him within the broad tradition of romantic poetry.

Murphy, Andrew. Seamus Heaney. 2nd ed. (Plymouth: Northcote House, British Council, 2000). This critical introduction to Heaney contains the most recent and up-to-date timeline of Heaney’s life, besides discussing in passing the most obvious cases of influence.

O’Donoghue, Bernard. Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). Contains a chapter on “Heaney’s ars poetica: Mandelstam, Dante, and the Government of the Tongue” and Heaney’s definition in his critical writings of the poet’s poetical and political roles through reference to poets with whom he shares certain affinities.

Wim van Mierlo

HEARST, WILLIAM RANDOLPH (1863–1951)

William Randolph Hearst was born in San Francisco. His father was the multimillionaire miner and rancher George Hearst. He attended public grammar schools, then received private tutoring while touring Europe before entering preparatory school at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. He studied at Harvard but did not complete his senior year. He was baptized an Episcopalian but attended the Presbyterian church and Bible school throughout his childhood. Creator of a vast publishing empire and the Hearst Corporation, he was a dominating and innovative figure in twentieth-century communications. During his career in newspapers, magazines, radio, and film, he changed the way mass media functioned. Sometimes sensationalizing and manipulating the news, he used his vast media empire to espouse causes he believed in. Many historians point to the antiSpanish outcry in Hearst’s newspapers as one factor influencing the United States’ entry into war with Spain in 1898. His newspapers initially supported liberal policies such as public ownership, antitrust laws, and labor unions, but they turned to vigorous opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies on taxes, trusts, and labor. Hearst became a staunch conservative and anticommunist and opposed the United States’ entry into World War II. At the peak of his influence in the mid1930s, his newspapers were so powerful as vehicles of public opinion in the United States that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all wrote for him. He served two terms in Congress, ran for presidential nomination in 1904, and was for a half century a major force in U.S. political thought and discourse.

Young Hearst was well read in both history and literature, enjoying the wit of William Makepeace Thackeray and the pageantry of Sir Walter Scott, but Charles Dickens was Hearst’s “literary hero for all time” and Dombey and Son was his favorite novel, according to his first biographer, who knew Hearst personally (Older 1936, 40). Hearst wrote to his political columnist Paul Mallon in 1935, “You ask me how I developed my own particular style . . . I wish I could write books that

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live, like Dickens or Thackeray; or like our own Americans, Mark Sullivan, Frank Simonds, or Carl Sandburg” (Hearst 1952, 4). Much of Dickens’s style is reflected in the humor and compassion of Hearst’s In the News opinion columns, which debuted in the Los Angeles Examiner in 1940. The Bible also influenced Hearst throughout his life, and he often quoted scripture and referred to the Bible in his columns. “The Bible means to me the accumulation of the wisdom of the ages,” he wrote. “It means also the expression and establishment of moral and religious standards . . . I want the familiar passages to speak to me . . . in the words that I learned in my youth.” Young Hearst also “delighted in” theater, and “never forgot” the productions of Shakespeare performed by the best actors of the day (Older 1936, 40). While on a 20-month tour of Europe before entering preparatory school, Hearst immersed himself in German, French, and Italian history. He read Legends of the Rhine on the German riverbank (P. A. Hearst to Husband, June 30, 1873, PAH Papers, Bancroft Library; Procter 1998, 20), delivered Cicero’s orations on the site where they were spoken (P. A. Hearst to Husband, July 13, 1873, PAH Papers, Bancroft Library; Procter 1998, 20), and went to Verona reading Romeo and Juliet (P. A. Hearst to Husband, July 19, 1873, PAH Papers, Bancroft Library; Procter 1998, 20). Hearst revered the American founders and collected their writings. While at Harvard he telegraphed his father requesting allowance to pay for a rare edition of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers (Older 1936, 61). Hearst was always a voracious reader of newspapers, beginning with a subscription to the London Times while a teen at St. Paul’s (Older 1936, 44). A letter from Hearst to his father in 1885 compares the family-owned San Francisco Examiner unfavorably to Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and demonstrates his growing depth of understanding about newspapers. Hearst urged his father to adjust every aspect of the Examiner to make it more like the World and suggested “all these changes be made not by degrees but at once” (Procter 1998, 42). Hearst’s practice of analyzing newspapers continued after his father turned the Examiner over to him. Writes one biographer, “He spread the pages of The World about his room—a habit that he continued throughout his life—in an attempt to dissect the different features of the day’s edition. And such an examination further confirmed his ideas for overhauling The Examiner” (Procter 1998, 42). Hearst also demonstrated a talent for discovering gifted writers. Among the budding writers Hearst engaged to contribute to his editorial pages was Ambrose Bierce. The contract allowed Bierce the time and means to write some of his best-known works. While Hearst’s political views and allegiances shifted throughout his life, he always identified with Thomas Jefferson and referred to himself as a Jeffersonian Democrat. He looked to Jefferson for political inspiration and made numerous pilgrimages to Monticello. Indeed, Hearst, once a presidential hopeful and always an active political force in American democracy, may well have drawn analogy between Jefferson’s intellectual retreat and his own mansion with its magnificent, 4,000-volume library at San Simeon.

Archives

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley: Hearst family letters, papers, documents, records, certificates. Unpublished transcripts of taped interviews.

Printed Sources

Hearst, William Randolph. William Randolph Hearst: A Portrait in His Own Words, Edmond Coblentz (ed.), (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952). Thoughtful analyses of Hearst’s

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belief system based on his writings. Coblentz reprints published works and private letters and supplies historical context—commentary includes numerous references to Hearst’s readings.

Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). Utilizes some previously unavailable archival material, but mostly relies on same archival material as previous biographers.

Older, Cora. William Randolph Hearst: American (New York: D. Appleton Century Company, 1936). Numerous direct references to Hearst’s reading, but lacks citations.

Procter, Ben. William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Includes text of numerous letters between Hearst and his parents, many previously unpublished.

Robinson, Judith. The Hearsts: An American Dynasty (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991). Includes text of numerous letters between Hearst and his parents, many previously unpublished.

Swanberg, W. A. Citizen Hearst (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961). Oft-cited first posthumous biography of Hearst. Includes information gleaned from author’s personal interviews with Hearst’s wife.

Richard N. Swanson

HEIDEGGER, MARTIN (1889–1976)

Martin Heidegger, the son of Johanna Kempf and master cooper Friedrich Heidegger, was born in the town of Messkirch, Baden, a solidly Roman Catholic area of southern Germany. His intellectual talent was noticed early by the local Catholic priest, Camillo Brandhuber, who taught him Latin and encouraged him in every way. He prepared for the Catholic priesthood at the archepiscopal gymnasium, the Konradihaus, Constance, from 1903 to 1906, and at Berthold’s Gymnasium, Freiburg im Breisgau, from 1906 to 1909, then was briefly a Jesuit novitiate in Austria in 1909. In Constance he came under the tutelage of Matthäus Lang, reading Catholic authors such as St. Augustine, St. Bonaventura, and Hermann Schell.

Heidegger enrolled at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in 1909 to study theology. He learned hermeneutics, biblical exegesis, and church dogmatics, but his favorite course was Carl Braig’s systematic theology. Under Braig he studied Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suárez, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In 1910 Heidegger’s first publications concerned the theologian Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster and the poet Johannes Jørgenson. Shortly thereafter he reviewed books by Friedrich Klimke, Josef Geyser, and Otto Zimmermann. In 1911 he switched to mathematics and philosophy, studied Christian philosophy under Arthur Schneider and history under Heinrich Finke, received his doctorate in 1913, and wrote his habilitation thesis on John Duns Scotus in 1915.

The revolutionary character of Heidegger’s thought seems to have been prompted by Franz Brentano’s The Multivalent Meaning of Being in Aristotle, which he received as a gift from Conrad Gröber, a prominent Catholic clergyman, in 1907. Heidegger as a Freiburg student engaged the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and was steeped in the neo-Kantianism of Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, and Emil Lask. Since neo-Kantianism is mostly a reaction against Hegelianism, Heidegger there intensified his lifelong study of Hegel. Other writers who absorbed his interest at this time include Sextus Empiricus, Blaise Pascal, Friedrich Hölderlin, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Søren Kierkegaard,

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