Dictionary of Literary Influences

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ACHEBE, CHINUA (1930– )

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born in Nigeria of Christian parents. He attended the Government College in Umuahia from 1944 to 1947 and University College in Ibadan from 1948 to 1953. Afterward, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in its radio division and began writing during his tenure there (1954–66). His publishing career began with Things Fall Apart (1958), which is his most famous and enduring work. He followed his first novel with four more (No Longer At Ease, 1960; Arrow of God, 1964; A Man of the People, 1966; and Anthills of the Savannah, 1988) along with several collections of short stories and essays. His support of the separatist government of Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War (1967–69) as a diplomat forced him into exile when the Nigerian government restored its control of the region; consequently, he has primarily lived and taught in the United States since the early 1970s.

The strongest literary influences on Achebe proved to come from two sources: his family and his European-style education. His mother and sister instilled in him a love of storytelling and traditional African culture, which was supplemented by the numerous visitors his father, a clergyman, attracted to their home. As a youth, he was entranced by works such as Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island because of their setting in exotic times and locales. His university reading, based on the European-based educational system, included works that depicted Africans as simple childlike beings who needed European caretakers in order to have an orderly society. He found this attitude depicted most vividly in Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939), and he wrote Things Fall Apart partially as a response to Cary’s novel. Despite his misgivings regarding the European attitudes toward Africans, he particularly admired the works of William Butler Yeats, whose poem The Second Coming inspired the title of his first novel. Yeats’s use of simple, direct language as well as the passion and intensity of his verse impressed Achebe, and he later sought to imbue his own works with similar simplicity and

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depth. Combining these elements with his own gifts as a writer quickly made Achebe one of the leading voices in African literature.

Archives

Chinua Achebe Papers: Houghton Library, Harvard University. Contains manuscripts of Achebe’s main publications from Arrow of God (1964) to Anthills of the Savannah (1988), and of a few later occasional writings down to 1993; with some publishers’ correspondence.

Printed Sources

Achebe, Chinua. Home and Exile (New York: Anchor Books, 2001). Includes three lectures in which he discusses, among other things, literary influences on his works.

Achebe, Chinua, and Bernth Lindfors (eds.). Conversations with Chinua Achebe. Literary Conversations Series (Oxford, Miss.: Mississippi University Press, 1997). Interviews.

Ezenwa-Ohaeton. Chinua Achebe: A Biography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

Joseph E. Becker

ADAMS, GERALD (1948– )

Gerry Adams was born in West Belfast, Northern Ireland, the eldest of ten children. Educated at St. Mary’s Grammar School in Belfast (1961–65), he left at 17 to become a barman but soon devoted himself to the Republican movement, by most accounts serving as an officer in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Arrested in 1971, he was released in 1972 to serve on an IRA delegation to England before being interned again in 1973. Upon his release in 1977 Adams became vice president of Sinn Féin, the political counterpart to the IRA. He used his position to encourage the strategy of supplementing IRA violence with politics by contesting elections in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. In 1983, Adams became president of Sinn Féin and was elected to Parliament in Westminster for the West Belfast seat (1983–92, 1997– ).

Apparently convinced that the goal of a united Ireland could be significantly advanced through political means, Adams attempted to publicly distance himself and his party from the IRA. In 1988 Adams began a dialogue with John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, the largest Nationalist party in Northern Ireland. These discussions eventually led to meetings with representatives of the Republic of Ireland and the British government, and, in 1994, to permission for Adams to enter the United States. Soon after Adams’s much publicized visit to America, the IRA announced a cease-fire. Despite a revival of violence in 1996 and delays in decommissioning the IRA’s stockpile of weapons, Sinn Féin participated in the all-party talks that eventually produced the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Although Adams is not one of his party’s representatives to the Northern Irish Assembly, he remains the president of Sinn Féin and the most visible international spokesman for Irish Republicanism.

A frequent contributor to various newspapers in Ireland and the United States, Adams has also written a number of fiction and nonfiction books including Pathway to Peace (1988), Cage Eleven (1990), The Street and Other Stories (1992), Free Ireland: Towards a Lasting Peace (1995), and An Irish Voice: The Quest for Peace (1997). In his autobiography, Before the Dawn (1996), Adams cites Irish Republican literature

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among his most important early influences; he specifically mentions Charles Kickham’s Knocknagow, or the Homes of Tipperary (1873) and the writings of labor leader James Connelly.

Archives

Neither Gerry Adams nor Sinn Féin have placed their materials in an archive. Linen Hill Library, Belfast, has an extensive collection of materials on The Troubles.

Printed Sources

Adams, Gerry. Before the Dawn: An Autobiography (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1996).

———.Selected Writings (Dingle: Brandon Press, 1994).

———.Signposts to Independence and Socialism (Dublin: Sinn Féin Publicity Dept., 1988). Kenna, Colm. Gerry Adams: A Biography (Cork: Mercier Press, 1990).

O’Brien, Brendan. The Long War: The IRA and Sinn Féin, 1985 to Today (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1993).

Sharrock, David, and Mark Devenport. Man of War, Man of Peace?: The Unauthorised Biography of Gerry Adams (London: Macmillan, 1997).

Padraic Kennedy

ADDAMS, JANE (1860–1935)

Addams’s tombstone in the family plot close to her birth house in Cedarville, Illinois, reads: “Hull House and The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.” She was the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize for Peace (1931). Basing Hull House on London’s Toynbee Hall, Addams and her colleagues developed need-based social reform work in Chicago. Their model shaped the national Social Settlement Movement, Addams becoming the preeminent woman leader. She had access to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Founder of the Women’s Peace Party and presider at the first International Congress of Women at the Hague, Netherlands (1915), she formed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, serving as president from 1919 to 1929. She helped establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and the American Civil Liberties Union (1920). Eleven books, hundreds of articles for ladies’ magazines, and countless speeches informed American understanding of immigrants, urban life, social reform, labor unionization, women’s suffrage, and peace issues.

John Huy Addams, her father, shaped her in the democratic principles of Abraham Lincoln and a nondogmatic, Quaker approach to religion. At Rockford Female Seminary (1877–81), Addams studied Greek, Latin, and German, absorbing the life wisdom of Socrates and the Greek tragedians, Isaiah’s prophetic vision of peace, and the Sermon on the Mount as the ethical bases for life. Reading Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), she vowed in college essays that her life would have noble purpose and meaning as did Goethe’s, Savonarola’s, Frederick the Great’s, and Dante’s; her reflective postcollege letters to Ellen Gates Starr (cofounder of Hull House) most often quote Carlyle. John Ruskin’s studies of art and architecture informed her experience of Europe, and his Unto This Last (1859), in its critique of industrial culture and vision of social reform for England,

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was the basis of much of her literary analysis of the United States. William Morris was the essential influence on the settlement’s arts and crafts program.

With Josiah Royce (The Spirit of Modern Philosophy) Addams shared central tenets of the Progressive Movement. Intellectual contemporaries were the philosophical pragmatist, William James, and John Dewey, educational reformer, who served on Hull House’s board of directors overseeing the Jean Piaget–based kindergarten and the extensive adult continuing education program. Taking the massive study of London by Charles Booth as inspiration, Addams’s edition of Hull House Maps and Papers became the first American sociological study of a neighborhood.

Count Lev Tolstoy, the father of modern pacifism, was a spiritual example. Addams’s international peace activities brought her into close communion with the British Fabian Socialists, especially Sydney and Beatrice Webb. She quoted H. G. Wells’s pessimism about human nature, and Norman Angell’s The Fruits of Victory sounded her conviction that war psychology was fatal to social living. Her philosophical book, Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), shared the insights of James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough on ancient myths as the origins of culture. Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), combined autobiography with a narrative of programs after the style of Henry Thoreau’s Walden.

Archives

Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, University of Illinois at Chicago. College themes, essays published in the Rockford Seminary Magazine, and copies of correspondence with Ellen Gates Starr.

Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pa., Jane Addams Collection, Papers from 1838 (bulk 1880–1935). Donated by Addams and her heirs.

Printed Sources

Addams, Jane. Democracy and Social Ethics. 1902. Reprint, with an introduction by Anne Firor Scott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).

Chambers, Clarke A. “Jane Addams.” In Leonard Unger (ed.), American Writers: Supplement I, Part 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979).

Davis, Allen F. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).

Farrell, John C. Beloved Lady: A History of Jane Addams’ Ideas on Reform and Peace (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967).

Hurt, James. “Walden on Halsted Street: Jane Addams’ Twenty Years at Hull-House,” The Centennial Review 23, 2 (Spring 1979), 185–207.

Levine, Daniel. Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971).

Schmider, Mary Ellen Heian. “Jane Addams’ Aesthetic of Social Reform” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1983). In-depth analysis of nonfiction prose reflecting literary influences, esp. Carlyle and Ruskin.

Mary Ellen Heian Schmider

ADENAUER, KONRAD (1876–1967)

Konrad Adenauer emerged after the Second World War as the central figure in West Germany’s economic and political recovery. His career in politics began as a member of the Cologne City Council, and in 1917 he became Lord Mayor of the city. Subsequently, he became president of the Prussian State Council and German

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Council of Cities and chairman of the Rhineland Provincial Committee. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Adenauer, who had not hidden distaste for them, lost his positions, and was forced to go into “exile.” The day after the Allied capture of Cologne on May 8, 1945, the Americans asked him to be mayor again, but the British took control of the city and dismissed him. Adenauer then set to work forming a new political party combining Protestants and Catholics into the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). After the Western occupying powers agreed to merge their zones to form a new state in 1948, Adenauer was appointed president of the Parliamentary Council, which hammered out a provisional constitution for West Germany while sustaining the long-term objective of a reunited Germany. After the first West German elections, the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), emerged as the dominant political force with Adenauer elected chancellor on September 15, 1949. As chancellor, Adenauer’s primary focus was a sovereign, democratic West German state firmly anchored in the West. For this West Germany joined the Council of Europe and the International Ruhr Authority. The achievement of national sovereignty, close ties with the free West, reconciliation with France, and the consolidation of social market economy all are landmarks that are inseparably linked with the name of Konrad Adenauer. When it came to rearmament, the memory of World War II created intense fear, among some, of any German national army. On the other hand, the perceived threat of war from the East made pacifist pleas unacceptable. However, Adenauer’s position prevailed. In his memorandum of August 29, 1950, Adenauer announced West Germany’s willingness to contribute to a European armed force. Normalized relations between Germany and the Western powers were formalized in 1954. As a politician, Adenauer had a long track record as a Francophile and remained sincerely committed to the idea of an integrated Europe. Adenauer also negotiated a compensation agreement with Israel in recognition of the horror perpetrated by Adolf Hitler and Germany on the Jews. Adenauer’s political career declined after 1961 when the CDU-CSU had to form a coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), and the FDP made it a condition that Adenauer retire in 1963. After retiring, Adenauer traveled and finished his memoirs until his death in 1967.

As a participant in German cultural life, Adenauer’s contributions are often submerged in the shadow of his political success. Throughout his life, Adenauer demonstrated his belief in the importance of a German cultural heritage—though with a clear preference for Western Europe. Raised in a Roman Catholic family, Adenauer demonstrated at an early age an interest in poetry and literature. His early exposure to classical literature combined an emphasis on Homer and Virgil with a traditional methodology, emphasizing the memorization of lengthy passages. On the one hand, Adenauer generally rejected works delving into irrationality, socially critical works, such as those of Heinrich Böll, and generally those linked with expressionism and neo-romanticism. Rather, Adenauer favored classical writers throughout his life, including Ernst Moritz Arndt, Heinrich Heine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Theodor Storm. Adenauer’s artistic interests, in comparison, drifted primarily into the sixteenth century and to the figure of Domenicos Theotocopoulos, better known as El Greco. After the Second World War, Adenauer believed Hitler’s rise to power to be in many ways a consequence of Germany’s departure from its Christian heritage and from its tradition as a tolerant land of diverse thinkers and poets. In foreign policy, Adenauer’s sense of

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Aitken, William Maxwell, First Baron Beaverbrook

religious conviction, combined with a strongly sentimental attachment to elements of classical German literature, no doubt influenced his political commitment to a West German state anchored in the West. In domestic policy, Adenauer stressed the need to return to Germany’s Judeo-Christian heritage as the cultural-intellectual foundation capable of inhibiting any revival of German militarism. Consequently, Adenauer did not perceive the rise of Hitler as a consequence of German longterm sociocultural factors, but a short-term deviation from those traditions during the heyday of National Socialism. Adenauer’s critics, however, have emphasized the prominence of nationalistic and militaristic elements in works read in his youth as an explanation for his political and social conservatism in his domestic policies.

Archives

Stiftung Bundeskanzler Adenauer Haus (Rhöndorf, Germany) is the primary depository for materials relating to all aspects of Adenauer’s life. However, the Bundesarchiv (Koblenz, Germany) and the Auswärtiges Amt (Bonn, Germany) hold vast collections of government documents from Adenauer’s tenure as chancellor.

Printed Sources

Adenauer, Konrad. Erinnerungen 1945–1953 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1965).

——.Briefe 1945–1955, 5 vols. (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1983–95).

——.Teegespräche 1950–1963, 4 vols. (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1984–92).

——.Memoirs 1945–1953, 4 vols. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965).

Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–52, 2 vols. (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1989).

Akten zur Vorgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–1949, 5 vols. (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1975–85).

Die Kabinettsprotokolle der Bundesregierung. 1949–1957, 14 vols. (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1982–2000).

Köhler, Henning. Adenauer: Eine Politische Biographie (Berlin: Propyläen, 1994).

Der Parlamentarische Rat 1948–1949. Akten und Protokolle, 4 vols. (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1975–89).

Schwarz, Hans-Peter. Adenauer. 1876–1967, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1986, 1991).

Weymar, Paul. Adenauer. His Authorized Biography (New York: Dutton & Co., 1955).

David A. Meier

AITKEN, WILLIAM MAXWELL, FIRST BARON

BEAVERBROOK (1879–1964)

William Maxwell Aitken, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, was born in Maple, Ontario. He spent his youth in Newcastle, New Brunswick. Aitken attended the local school, but failed to gain university entrance. He briefly clerked with a law firm before succeeding in insurance and bond sales. By the age of 30 Aitken had brought about the merger of Canada’s largest steel manufacturing concerns, riding the Canadian economic boom to millionaire status. In 1910 he relocated to London and became immersed in the Conservative Party.

He made his mark as a politician, a newspaper proprietor, and a historian. Although Aitken sat in the Commons from 1910 to 1916 and then ascended to the Lords, he was most known for his personal associations and intrigues, particularly

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for his behind-the-scenes involvement in the accession of both David Lloyd George (in 1916) and Bonar Law (in 1923) to the position of prime minister. During World War I he served as Britain’s minister of information (1917–18). During World War II long-term friendship with Winston Churchill led to service as minister for aircraft production (1940–41), minister of supply (1941–42), minister of war production (1942), and Lord Privy Seal (1943–45). In 1916 Beaverbrook acquired controlling interest in the Daily Express. He founded the Sunday Express in 1921 and in 1929 purchased the Evening Standard. He attempted to use his newspapers to exert political influence, with mixed results; however their modernized style of presentation set new standards. The Daily Express achieved the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world under his personal management. Beaverbrook also collected and greatly restricted access to the papers of major political figures. He utilized them to write controversial histories that have strongly influenced the historical interpretation of World War I and postwar events. His most noted works include Politicians and the Press (1925), Politicians and the War (2 vols., 1928 and 1932), Men and Power, 1917–1918 (1956), and The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George (1962).

Beaverbrook’s identity as a Canadian, a supporter of Empire, and an entrepreneur remained predominant influences throughout his life. He saw himself as an outsider who championed merit. His father’s occupation also profoundly (and ambivalently) affected Beaverbrook. He described himself as “a child of the manse” and made frequent biblical references: King David intrigued him and he wrote an unpublished life of Jesus. His father was well read and enjoyed a large library. Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott were Beaverbrook’s favorite childhood authors.

As an adult, he was “too impatient to sit down for long with a book or even a newspaper.” Secretaries provided summations of important works (Taylor 1972, 9). Beaverbrook kept abreast of breaking news at all times, installing ticker tape in his homes. He calculated his historical interpretation, access to the documents he controlled, and his editorial policies in terms of their immediate contribution to his current political goals. The campaigns of Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, initiated Beaverbrook’s belief that newspapers offered him his greatest opportunity for political influence.

Beaverbrook sustained intimate friendships with a number of authors, including Rudyard Kipling and Churchill, with whom he exchanged drafts and comments. He also submitted his work to politicians who played a role in events he wrote about, seeking their clarification. Beaverbrook prided himself on his hospitality toward developing talent and cultivated writers as protégés. Some influenced him in return: Arnold Bennett perhaps most strongly.

Archives

Beaverbrook Collection, Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Canadian correspondence.

Beaverbrook Papers, House of Lords Records Office, London. Correspondence, draft manuscripts of published works, unpublished works, newspaper clippings, and library.

Printed Sources

Chisholm, Anne, and Michael Davies. Lord Beaverbrook: A Life (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993).

Taylor, A. J. P. Beaverbrook (London: Hamilton Hamish, 1972).

Anne Kelsch

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Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna

AKHMATOVA, ANNA ANDREEVNA (1889–1966)

Anna Akhmatova was born near Odessa, but grew up outside of St. Petersburg in Tsarskoe Selo. In her “Autobiographical Prose,” Akhmatova claimed to have learned to read from Lev Tolstoy’s Grammar and to speak French by the age of five (Akhmatova 1994, 2). She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo and later in Kiev at the Fundukleyevskaya Gymnasium. In 1907 Akhmatova published her first poem and enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the Kiev College for Women. She withdrew from Kiev College a year later to study literature and history in St. Petersburg, where she met her first husband, the Acmeist poet, Nikolay Gumilyov. Between 1910 and 1912 she and Gumilyov traveled to Paris, Switzerland, and Northern Italy. In 1912 Akhmatova published her first volume of poetry, entitled Evening; her second book of verse, Rosary, appeared in 1914. Three more volumes of poetry came out before she was banned from publishing in 1922. Once silenced, Akhmatova turned her attention to the study of the works of Pushkin and produced three valuable critical studies. She also worked as a translator from French, English, and Italian. Her only son, Lev, was arrested and spent 18 years in prison. Despite years of forced silence, Akhmatova emerged as one of the major voices of Acmeism and published more than a dozen volumes of verse, which included two of her best known works: “Requiem” and “Poem without a Hero.”

As a student in Tsarskoe Selo, Akhmatova attended lectures by the Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky, one of her earliest artistic inf luences (Reeder 1994, 9). In My Half Century she wrote, “I find my own ‘origin’ in Annensky’s poems” (Akhmatova 1992, 111). Ketchian sees the inf luence as structural; Akhmatova’s verse shows “dual-layered correspondences with Annensky, which often hail back to their common source, Alexander Pushkin” (Ketchian 1986, 123). Moreover, Pushkin’s inf luence can be seen in her method of borrowing lines, images, and similes from other writers and transforming them to make them her own (Reeder 1994, 184). Several scholars have noted that Akhmatova conducted “conversations” in this way with a variety of authors (Nayman 1991, 25; Reeder 1994, 183; Ketchian 1986, 121). “Byron, Shelley, Keats, Joyce and Eliot are connected with the cycles of ‘Cinque’ and ‘The Wild Rose in Flower’ and with ‘Poem Without a Hero’, no less than Virgil and Horace, Dante, Baudelaire and Nerval” (Nayman 1991, 99). Among the few books she kept with her were the Bible, Dante, a complete Shakespeare, and the collected Pushkin (Nayman 1991, 93).

Archives

Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Moscow Central Archive contains 21 notebooks from her last decade. Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Printed Sources

Akhmatova, Anna. “Autobiographical Prose: Sketches, Notes, Diary Entries, and Lectures.” In Konstantin Polivanov (ed.) and Patricia Beriozkina (trans.), Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle (Fayetteville, Ark.: The University of Arkansas Press, 1994). Includes contemporaries of Akhmatova.

———. My Half Century, Ronald Meyer (ed.), (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1992). Includes diary entries, notebook excerpts, prose works on Pushkin, book reviews, public addresses, and correspondence.

Chukovskaya, Lidia. Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, 2 vols. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1976, 1980).

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Haight, Amanda. Anna Akhmatova. A Poetic Pilgrimage (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Ketchian, Sonia. The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova: A Conquest of Time and Space, F. D. Reeve (trans.), (München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1986).

Nayman, Anatoly. Remembering Anna Akhmatova, Wendy Rosslyn (trans.), (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991). Nayman, a poet and translator, was Akhmatova’s literary secretary in her later years.

Reeder, Roberta. Anna Akhmatova. Poet and Prophet (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

Erika Haber

ALI, MUHAMMAD (1942– )

Muhammad Ali became heavyweight champion of the world in 1964, at age 22, when he defeated title holder Sonny Liston. Undefeated until February 1978 when he lost the title to Leon Spinks, Ali reclaimed his title during a rematch seven months later. Ali remained undefeated until his retirement in 1981, with 56 wins, including 37 knockouts. Heroically battling Parkinson’s disease, during the 1990s he became one of the most popular and widely recognized sports figures in the world.

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.—who adopted the name Muhammad Ali in 1964 when he joined the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims)—was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr., a sign painter, and Odessa Gray Clay, a domestic worker. Ali attended segregated elementary and secondary schools in Louisville. He started boxing at age 12. By the time he graduated from high school in 1960, he had fought 108 amateur bouts. He had also won six Kentucky Golden Gloves championships, two National Golden Glove tournaments, and two National Amateur Athletic Union titles. Also in 1960, he won the gold medal at the Olympics in Rome, Italy, as a light-heavyweight.

In 1967, three years after winning the world heavyweight title, Ali was convicted of draft evasion for refusing to be inducted into the armed forces during the Vietnam War due to his religious beliefs. As a result, his boxing license was revoked and he was stripped of his title. Although the Supreme Court reversed his conviction on June 28, 1971, granting him the status of conscientious objector, Ali was forced to fight Joe Frazier to regain his title.

In his autobiography, Ali revealed that he developed his self-promotional “I am the greatest!” tactic after reading about Gorgeous George, a wrestler whose bragging and playful intimidation of opponents drew record crowds. Although his primary focus was physical development, after retirement he wished to learn as much as he could, “because I know nothing compared to what I need to know.” As a devout Muslim, he was profoundly influenced by the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Koran, the foundation of his Islamic faith. Ali’s colorful personal life and tumultuous professional career have inspired numerous writers to document his rise from poverty to celebrity, focusing on his love for his people, his generosity, and his refusal to compromise principles, regardless of the consequences.

Archives

Muhammad Ali Center, Louisville, Kentucky.

Printed Sources

Ali, Muhammad, and Richard Durham. The Greatest: My Own Story (New York: Random House, 1975). Includes a chronology of key events (1942–72) and Ali’s fight record (1960–75).

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