Dictionary of Literary Influences

Lawrence, T. E.

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin: numerous drafts, manuscripts, and typescripts of the majority of works.

See Roberts and Poplawski for numerous other holdings.

Printed Sources

Brunsdale, Mitzi M. The German Effect on D.H. Lawrence and His Works 1885–1912 (Berne: Peter Lang, 1978).

Dircks, Mrs. Rudolf. Essays of Schopenhauer (London: Walter Scott, 1903). The collection annotated by Lawrence.

Ellis, David. D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Meyers, Jeffrey (ed.). D.H. Lawrence and Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985).

Milton, Colin. Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987).

Roberts, Warren, and Paul Poplawski. A Bibliography of D.H. Lawrence, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Worthen, John. D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Gregory F. Tague

LAWRENCE, T. E. (1888–1935)

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born the illegitimate son of Thomas Chapman and Sarah Lawrence in North Wales. He attended Jesus College, Oxford University (1907–10), studied military history, wrote a thesis on crusader castle architecture in Syria, and received first class honors. He worked as an archaeologist at Carchemish in Syria (1911–14), where he learned to speak Arabic. In World War I, he served on Cairo’s general staff as a “temporary second-lieutenant interpreter” and cartographer. In 1916, he went to western Arabia to aid the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, where he began working closely with the Hashemite Sharif, Faysal ibn Husayn, as British liaison officer. From March 1917 to October 1918, he coordinated attacks by small groups of Arab irregular soldiers on the Hejaz railway, gathered information on the geography and peoples of northern Arabia and Syria, led a surprise capture of the port of Aqaba, and helped to consolidate Arab control of Damascus after its capture. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, Companion of Bath, and Croix de Guerre, but declined knighthood. After the war, Lawrence was mythologized as “Lawrence of Arabia,” emerging in the media as an enigmatic, romanticized hero. G. B. Shaw, Siegfried Sassoon, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, and Winston Churchill considered his self-analytical war memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, among the greatest contemporary works in English. Lawrence died in 1935 following a motorcycle accident.

Lawrence read voraciously and recommended his favorites to his correspondents. Lawrence’s initial travels to Syria were informed by studies of the Bible, A. H. Layard’s works on the excavation of ancient Nineveh, and John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851–53). He enjoyed romantic renderings of medieval history, such as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85), Maurice Hewlett’s Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay (1900), and above all William Morris’s Hollow Land and Other

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Tales, Roots of the Mountains, Sigurd the Volsung, Well at the World’s End, and Wood Beyond the World. Lawrence once commented: “I suppose everybody loves one writer unreasonably . . . I’d rather Morris than the world.” He carried copies of his favorite books with him in Arabia; for example, a British officer saw him reading Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1469) in a mess tent. He also studied orientalist travel narratives: Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) and David Hogarth’s A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (1896), but disliked Richard Burton, whom he considered “vulgar.” Lawrence’s descriptions of the Arabs reflected both orientalist imagery and imperialist concepts; he often compared educated, nationalist Syrians unfavorably to the idealized “unspoiled” Bedouin. Lawrence later became a book collector, favoring war literature and poetry.

Archives

Bodleian Library, Oxford: Reserve Manuscript Collection.

British Library Additional Manuscripts Collection, London: diaries, letters to Charlotte Shaw.

Public Record Office, Kew: Arab Bureau files, Foreign Office and War Office files, Intelligence files.

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge: letters to Robert Graves.

Printed Works

English, J. A. “Kindergarten Soldier: The Military Thought of Lawrence of Arabia,” Military Affairs ( Jan. 1987), 7–11.

Lawrence, A. W. (ed.). T. E. Lawrence by His Friends (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937). This edition includes titles in Lawrence’s book collection.

Lawrence, T. E. Letters of T. E. Lawrence, David Garnett (ed.), (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939). Some contentious material edited out.

———.T. E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters, Malcolm Brown (ed.), (New York: Norton, 1989). Updated collection; indexed references to books, plays, and poetry.

———.Seven Pillars of Wisdom, A Triumph (London: Jonathon Cape, 1935). Account of the Arab Revolt of 1916–18; includes literary references and quotations.

Wilson, Jeremy. Lawrence of Arabia, the Authorized Biography (London: Heinemann, 1989). A cautious and reliable study; excellent bibliography.

Indira Falk Gesink

LEARY, TIMOTHY FRANCIS (1920–1996)

Timothy Leary, the only child of affluent Roman Catholic parents, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. When he was 13, his alcoholic father abandoned him and his mother. He attended Classical High School in Springfield from 1935 until 1938, when he was nearly expelled for truancy and insubordination. Because his principal refused to recommend him to the prestigious colleges he wanted, he spent two years at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, while waiting for admission to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Shortly after becoming a plebe in 1940, he was officially ostracized, or “silenced,” for drunkenness and lying. Eventually his enemies among the upperclassmen hounded him into resigning in 1941. That fall he matriculated at the University of Alabama, but was expelled a year later for sleeping in the girls’ dormitory. Drafted, he earned his bachelor’s degree in the army in 1944. After receiving his M.S. in psychology from Washington State University in 1946 and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Univer-

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sity of California at Berkeley in 1950, he taught at Berkeley and the University of California at San Francisco until 1956 and directed psychological research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital, Oakland, from 1952 to 1957. He taught at the University of Copenhagen in 1958 and lived briefly in Italy before joining the Harvard University psychology faculty in 1959. Fired by Harvard in 1963 for giving psychedelic drugs to students, he established an experimental drug commune in Millbrook, New York, and founded the League for Spiritual Discovery.

As a preteen, Leary read 8 or 10 books a week, mostly novels, history, and biography, not children’s books. He was reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi when his grandfather praised him as the only reader among his nine children and six grandchildren. Leary’s father’s bookshelves were full of British and Celtic poetry. At Holy Cross he enjoyed classical Latin authors. He found being shunned by his fellow cadets an advantage at West Point, because it created a monastic atmosphere in which he read Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Will Durant, Buddhism, and mysticism. Immediately after his dismissal from West Point, he checked out James Joyce’s Ulysses from the restricted collection at Springfield Public Library, simply because it had been forbidden. In the 1950s and early 1960s, his interest in psychoactive drugs was sparked by Frank Barron, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Nick Chewelos, Walter H. Clark, Sidney Cohen, Keith Ditman, Allen Ginsberg, Gerald Heard, Abram Hofer, Michael Hollingshead, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Janiger, Jack Kerouac, John Lilly, Jack London, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Humphrey Osmond, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Gordon Wasson, and Alan Watts. While a fugitive in Switzerland in 1971, Leary met Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. Among the other major influences Leary cited in his autobiography, Flashbacks, are Giordano Bruno, Carlos Castañeda, Aleister Crowley, Dante, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Hermann Hesse, I Ching, William James, Ken Kesey, Arthur Koestler, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Paolo Mantegazza, Marshall McLuhan, Gerard K. O’Neill, Paracelsus, Sri Krishna Prem, Thomas Pynchon, Wilhelm Reich, and Robert Anton Wilson.

Archives

A small collection of Leary’s papers is at the University of Texas at Austin, but most of his effects remain in private hands.

Printed Sources

Forte, Robert (ed.). Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In (Rochester, Vt.: Park Street, 1999). Gilmore, Mikal. “Timothy Leary, 1920–1996,” Rolling Stone, July 11–25, 1996.

Kleps, Art. Millbrook: A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism: Recension of 1994 (Austin: Neo-American Church of Texas, 1994).

———. Millbrook: The True Story of the Early Years of the Psychedelic Revolution (Oakland, Calif.: Bench, 1977).

Leary, Timothy Francis. Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era: An Autobiography (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1990).

Mansnerus, Laura. “Timothy Leary, Pied Piper of Psychedelic 60’s, Dies at 75,” New York Times, June 1, 1996.

Slack, Charles W. Timothy Leary, the Madness of the Sixties, and Me (New York: P.H. Wyden, 1974).

Eric v.d. Luft

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Le Corbusier

LE CORBUSIER (1887–1965)

Charles Edouard Jeanneret was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. At the age of thirteen he left conventional school to follow in his father’s footsteps as a watch dial engraver. In 1902, Jeanneret enrolled in a local art school under the tutelage of Charles L’Eplattenier, who steered the young student toward studies in architecture. He graduated from college in 1907, and traveled throughout Europe to study reinforced concrete techniques under August Perret in Paris and the theories of the Bauhaus school of design under Peter Behrens. As a young architect, Jeanneret developed a highly effective iron-concrete skeletal system for producing structurally superior skyscrapers. During the 1920s he adopted the name Le Corbusier after a maternal forbear and established a design studio in his native Switzerland. Le Corbusier’s minimalist dwellings became known as “machines for living” due to the basic geometric design of their floor plans and their overall regularity and simplicity. Le Corbusier wrote prolifically on both residential and urban planning in such works as Towards a New Architecture, The City of Tomorrow and The Decorative Art of Today. Le Corbusier codified his style of architecture in designs for the League of Nations during the 1930s and in his urban planning efforts to aid in the restructuring of European cities in the aftermath of the Second World War. He founded the International Congress of Modern Architecture and produced many successful (albeit aesthetically controversial) projects throughout the 1950s, such as the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Church of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, France, and the Unite d’Habitation in Marseille. He was also commissioned to modernize and transform the urban plan of Chandigarh, the capital city of the Indian state of Punjab, through the design and construction of such structures as the Palace of Justice and the Secretariat Building. He drowned in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Cap Martin, France, at the age of 78.

Le Corbusier’s so-called “international style” of architecture was directly influenced by a movement known as purism, formulated by Amedee Ozenfant. Purism rejected complicated abstractions of form and advocated a return to simple geometric planning as the basis for residential design. Ozenfant’s Apres Le Cubisme explained the principals of his functionalist architectural design and espoused a rejection of ornament and unnecessary detail in the exterior and interior designs of buildings. The idea that universal beauty and truth is revealed through the abandonment of the complicated and the realistic in favor of the geometric and stylized is one that Le Corbusier inherited from many sources, however. For centuries, the need for this type of minimalist design had been espoused by prominent theorists such as Maurice Deufrene and Karl Grosz as well as in Edward Shure’s Les Grand Inites and Owen Jones’s Grammar and Ornament. The respected architect and writer Adolf Loos also published his work Ornament and Crime in 1908, which defined functionalism and simplicity as the primary prerequisites of all good modern design. Le Corbusier closely studied Loos’s precepts, as well as those of Adolf Zeising and Gustav Fechner, whose principles of the “Golden Section” directly influenced the way in which Le Corbusier divided his modular residential units according to the intricate measurements of the human body.

Archives

The Getty Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, California.

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Printed Sources

Brooks, H. Allen. Le Corbusier’s Formative Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Curtis, William J. R. Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1986).

Serenyi, Peter (ed.). Le Corbusier in Perspective (Upper Saddle River, N. J. : Prentice Hall, 1975).

Gregory L. Schnurr

LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH (1870–1924)

Vladimir Ilich Lenin was born in Simbirsk, Russia. His parents, Ilya and Maria Ulyanov, had a lasting influence on the young and mature Lenin, especially with respect to his educational and work values. He studied at the Simbirsk Classical Gymnasium, where he learned Latin, Greek, French, and German. In 1886 Lenin’s father died, and his brother Alexander, who had joined a revolutionary organization that attempted to assassinate Alexander III, was tried and executed. These were two important turning points in the young Lenin’s life. After his brother’s execution, Lenin joined terrorist organizations dedicated to agrarian-socialist ideals. Lenin chose to study jurisprudence at the same university where his father studied, the Imperial Kazan University (1887–1891). In 1893 Lenin moved to St. Petersburg, where a group of young Marxists such as Petr Struve and Sergei Bulgakov published on the Russian economy and society. Lenin published his first article, “New Economic Trends in Peasant Life,” in 1893. Two years later, Lenin left for Switzerland to meet the father of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov, whose interpretations of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels greatly influenced his own. During the same year, he met his future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869–1939). In January 1897 Lenin was exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activity. After his exile, Lenin left for Zurich to join Plekhanov in 1900. During this trip, Lenin helped organize the Marxist newspaper Iskra (The Spark), which was a mouthpiece for revolutionary propaganda. In 1901 Lenin published a small booklet, What Is to Be Done?, in which he outlined the organizational tactics of an illegal political party. During the Second Party Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, a major tactical and organizational disagreement between Lenin and Yuli Martov broke the party into two camps: Lenin’s followers became the Bolsheviks and Martov’s, the Mensheviks. After the 1905 Revolution, Lenin showed a willingness to break with conventional orthodox Marxism, which stipulated that there would first occur a “bourgeois” revolution and subsequently a socialist revolution led by the working class. In April 1917, after the fall of the Russian monarchy, Lenin considered bypassing the first conventional stage of the revolutionary process. In his “April Thesis” he argued that Russia was ready for the consolidation of the revolutionary process. Lenin’s most important role in the October Revolution was as a political strategist and inspirer. After the consolidation of Bolshevik power, Lenin’s health increasingly deteriorated. He suffered fatigue and bad nerves. He endured a number of massive strokes and an assassination attempt. Although Lenin continued to write and work in the remaining three years of his life, his role as a political and organizational leader was limited.

Lenin was in every respect a nineteenth-century intellectual. His favorite authors and thinkers were from the nineteenth century. During his gymnasium days, he

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read and translated to Russian the Latin and Greek classics. As a young boy, he read nineteenth-century classical Russian literature and especially admired the novels of Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Lev Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. However, his favorite novel in his adolescent years was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After the assassination of his older brother, Alexander, the young Lenin turned to the Russian radical author Nikolai Chernyshevski, whose novel What Is to Be Done? was not only a favorite of his brother’s, but had an immense effect on Lenin’s consciousness and direction in life. Lenin’s earliest expression of a distinctive “Leninism” was in the 1902 pamphlet titled What Is to Be Done? During university days, he familiarized himself with David Ricardo, Charles Darwin, Henry Buckle, Marx, and Engels. He read and admired Marx’s Capital and The Poverty of Philosophy; Anti-Dühring and The Condition of the Working Class by Engels; and Our Disagreements by Plekhanov. Agrarian socialists such as Pëtr Tkachëv and Sergei Nechaev and the Jacobins of the French Revolution commanded respect as well. The populist author of short stories Gleb Uspensky should also be mentioned as an important influence on Lenin. However, unlike some of the other leading Marxist thinkers, such as Alexander Bogdanov, Nikolai Bukharin, and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who greatly admired twentieth-century social thought, Lenin was not interested in fashionable, contemporary ideas. He constantly returned to his four principal figures for intellectual stimulus: Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, and Karl Kautsky.

Archives

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI; Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History), Moscow, Russia: Lenin’s archive (Fond 2) Manuscripts. Documents of Lenin’s family. Activities of Lenin.

Printed Sources

Haimson, Leopold. The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955).

Harding, N. Lenin’s Political Thought, 2 vols. (London:Macmillan, 1977–1981).

Pipes, Richard. (ed.). The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

———. Lenin: A Political Life, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1985–95). Volkogonov, D. A. Lenin: A New Biography (New York: Free Press, 1994).

Eugene M. Avrutin

LEVI, PRIMO (1919–1987)

Primo Levi lived most of his life in the same apartment in which he was born on July 31, 1919, in Turin, Italy. Raised as an assimilated Jew with no real ties to religion, Levi grew up in a family devoted to books. He studied chemistry at the University of Turin, from which he received his doctorate in 1941. Meanwhile, in 1938, the Fascist regime in Italy had enacted a series of anti-Semitic regulations that, among other things, required the expulsion of Jews from universities. With great difficulty, Levi managed to complete his studies.

Following the Nazi invasion of northern Italy in 1943, Levi was deported to Auschwitz. He attributed his survival in part to his training as a chemist, to the

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kindness of a fellow inmate—an Italian bricklayer who supplied him with extra food—and to luck. His work in the synthetic rubber factory attached to the camp spared him from much of the harsh weather, physical labor, and ultimately the gas chambers that awaited most inmates of Auschwitz.

Following his liberation in 1945 and eight months spent as a refugee in Russia, Levi returned home to Turin and resumed his work as a chemist, married Lucia Morpurgo, and raised two children. He began to write in his spare time, and his experiences in Auschwitz became the source of a vivid and remarkable body of literature that continues to astonish readers today with its precise scientific perspective and its insights into the broader human condition.

In 1947, a small publisher issued Levi’s memoir Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz, 1959), which initially generated little interest. Not until its reissue in an expanded edition and the many translations that followed did the world recognize the profundity of Levi’s work. He followed this with La tregua (The Reawakening, 1965), an account of the eight months among European refugees in Russia following his liberation. He retired from his career in chemistry in 1977 to pursue writing full time and produced the crowning achievement of his literary career, Il sistemo periodico, (The Periodic Table, 1986). Using Mendeleyev’s table of physical elements as his framework, Levi created a masterful series of autobiographical stories that linked the physical properties of matter with the psychological properties of the events he recounted.

Levi’s unlikely career as a writer is rooted in his survival of the holocaust. “My uncommon experience as a concentration camp inmate and as a survivor has deeply influenced my later life and has turned me into a writer.” In 1981, Levi published

La ricerca della ridici (The Search for Roots: A Personal Antholog y, 2001), a work that would “bring to light the possible traces of what has been read on what has been written.” Among his recorded favorite writers were Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Isaac Babel, Paul Célan, and T. S. Eliot. Levi’s anthology also includes such varied sources of personal and literary inspiration as scientist and science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke, the Greek poet Homer, Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, the Old Testament book of Job, and the French satirist and novelist François Rabelais, “to whom,” Levi wrote, “I have been faithful for forty years without in the least resembling him or knowing exactly why.” What links these seemingly disparate influences is, for Levi, a common tension. “More or less all show the effects of the fundamental dichotomies customary in the destiny of every conscious person” (Levi 2001, 8).

Archives

Lawrence Sheldon Rudner Papers, Special Collections Department, North Carolina State

University Library, 218.6.22, notes, articles.

Printed Sources

Anissimov, Myriam. Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist, Steve Cox (trans.), (New York: Overlook Press, 1999).

Homer, Frederic D. Primo Levy and the Politics of Survival (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001).

Kremer, Roberta S. (ed.). Memory and Mastery: Primo Levi as Writer and Witness (Albany: State University of New York, 2001).

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Levi, Primo. The Search for Roots: A Personal Antholog y, Peter Forbes (trans.), (London: Allen Lane, 2001).

Patruno, Nicholas. Understanding Primo Levi (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995).

Philip Bader

LÉVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE GUSTAVE (1908– )

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Belgian philosopher and anthropologist, was born on November 28, 1908, to a Jewish family in Brussels, Belgium. Lévi-Strauss spent his formative years in France where he attended a Parisian lycée and later the Sorbonne, where he studied philosophy. Following his formal education, Lévi-Strauss taught for several years in numerous provincial French schools before developing a deep interest in anthropology, which would remain with him for the rest of his life. With this new interest, Lévi-Strauss accepted the post of professor of sociology at Sao Paulo University in Brazil from 1935 to 1939, at which time he began his own research into the lives of primitives. When World War II erupted, Lévi-Strauss returned to France to serve in the French army’s futile stand against the Nazis from 1939 to 1941. With the fall of France and his being Jewish, Lévi-Strauss was forced to flee to the United States where he had secured a teaching position at the New School for Social Research in New York (1942–45).

At the war’s end, Lévi-Strauss returned to France, where he began to build his reputation as a researcher and thinker and became a leader in the structural anthropological school of thought while gaining a reputation as a teacher at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris from 1950 to 1974 and at the College de France until 1982. Lévi-Strauss spent his life of writing and teaching espousing the utilization of structuralism when considering all aspects of human society, especially mankind’s myths, about which he wrote extensively in his four-volume Mythologiques (1964, 1966, 1968, 1972).

Although considered an eclectic genius in his own right, Lévi-Strauss freely acknowledged the influences other thinkers had upon him. He credits the Austrianborn American anthropologist Robert Harry Lowie with turning the young LéviStrauss to ethnography, especially through his work with the culture of American Plains Indians in Primitive Society (1920) and in The History of Ethnological Thought

(1937). It was through the influence of Lowie that Lévi-Strauss was introduced to theory of the unconscious in cultural phenomenon espoused by Franz Boas and to the investigations into the unconscious by Sigmund Freud.

Like many young aspiring anthropologists, Lévi-Strauss experienced the substantial intellectual sway of Émile Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss during his student days in Paris. Most influential was Durkheim’s journal L’Année Sociologique, which Mauss took over at his uncle’s death. Both Durkheim and Mauss were concerned with primitives’ developing an identity through their music and rites of mourning, a concept which they stressed as the thesis of their major collaboration Primitive Classification (1903). But it was when he arrived in New York for his teaching stint at the New School that Lévi-Strauss became aware of the two scholars who would formalize his perception of the structural construction and investigation of all anthropological concerns. The application of structuralism to

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abstract concepts was most clearly demonstrated in the works of Lévi-Strauss’s teaching colleague and Russian linguist Roman Jakobson and Ferdinand de Saussure, both of which touted language as a system of abstract rules that could be investigated through structuralism just as any other human intellectual activity could.

Archives

Laboratoire D’Anthropologie Sociale, College de France, Paris. Contains most of his papers and manuscripts.

Musee de l’Homme, Paris. Fieldwork materials.

Printed Sources

Champagne, Roland A. Claude Lévi-Strauss (Boston: Twayne, 1987).

Henaff, Marcel. Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropolog y (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropolog y [1958], Monique Layton (trans.), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). The seminal work in the Lévi-Strauss canon.

Tom Frazier

LEWIS, C. S. (1898–1963)

Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, near Belfast in Ireland. Clive decided to go by “Jack” when still young, and “C. S.” became a pen name. When only nine, his mother died, and Jack was sent to a series of preparatory schools, ending with Malvern College. From 1914 to 1917, he studied with a private tutor, William Thompson Kirkpatrick, who recognized both his gifts and his limitations, writing to Lewis’s father that “You’ll make a writer or a scholar of him, but you’ll not make anything else” (Lewis 1955, 183). He entered University College, Oxford, in April 1917 but was called up for military service soon after. Wounded at the Battle of Arras in April 1918, Lewis recovered in time to return to Oxford at the start of 1919. In 1924 he took a temporary post as lecturer at University College and was elected to a fellowship in Magdalen College in 1925, a position he held until 1954, when he accepted the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University. His first work on medieval literature, The Allegory of Love (1936), though now superceded in its particulars, opened up the academic study of emotion in literature. Lewis’s scholarship contributed to establishing the continuity between medieval and Renaissance literature. While at Oxford, Lewis underwent a conversion to Christianity and returned to the Anglican confession of his youth. His books and essays on Christian living and apologetics have formed an ongoing and ecumenical following, which sees him as perhaps the twentieth century’s best presenter of a “reasonable Christianity.” Finally, his fiction continues to amuse and educate. Lewis married Joy Davidman Gresham in 1956; she died from cancer in 1960. Lewis taught until he suffered a heart attack in July 1963 and died later that year on November 22.

By the time he was eighteen, Lewis had read most of the classics of English literature from Spenser’s Faerie Queen to Keats and Dickens and even the American Mark Twain, had mastered Norse, Greek, and Roman mythologies, and was beginning to read ancient and medieval philosophy in Greek and Latin. This classical background appears in all his works, perhaps most complexly in his retelling of the

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Cupid and Psyche myth, Till We Have Faces (1956). At the age of 10 he read Milton’s Paradise Lost; its continued impact on him is evidenced in his Preface to “Paradise Lost,” published in 1942. Stylistic and thematic aspects of the fantasyromances of William Morris and George MacDonald are reflected in Lewis’s allegorical Narnia Chronicles; indeed, MacDonald is portrayed as Lewis’s mentor in his theological fantasy The Great Divorce. Lewis loved the science fiction of H. G. Wells (though not his naturalism), but it was David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus that revealed to him the imaginative possibility of the genre as a “spiritual adventure” (Sayer 1988, 153). The influence of both writers appears in Lewis’s space trilogy

Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, which is one of the first fictional works in which humankind is shown as more menacing than the extraterrestrials. The apologetic writings of G. K. Chesterton were particularly important for Lewis and are often quoted in his own essays. Besides these predecessors, Lewis was influenced by the participants in the “Inklings,” the semi-formal philosophical and literary discussion group Lewis gathered together in Oxford, especially his older brother Warren H. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Hobbit and Lord of the Rings were first read in this group, as indeed were Warren’s histories and Jack’s novels.

Archives

The Lewis Papers, including 11 volumes compiled by W. H. Lewis. Buswell Memorial Library, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, with a copy at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England.

Correspondence and Literary Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford, England.

Printed Sources

Cantor, Norman. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow, 1991). Assesses Lewis’s scholarly impact.

Green, Roger Lancelyn, and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: a Biography, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994).

Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955). Retells his progression from atheist to Christian believer; provides an account of literary influences to about 1931.

Sayer, George. Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988). Perhaps the most insightful biography to date.

Wilson, A. N. C. S. Lewis: a Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Good biography from an unsentimental observer.

Richard R. Follett

LEWIS, JOHN LLEWELLYN (1880–1969)

John Lewis was born in Lucas County, Iowa, to Welsh immigrants. Lewis’s father, Thomas, a coal miner in Lucas, was blacklisted for union-organizing activities, forcing the Lewis family to move repeatedly while John was young. He quit school before completing eighth grade and entered the workforce. The Lewis family returned to Lucas after the blacklists were removed and John briefly joined his father in the mines. After five years’ traveling, Lewis returned to Lucas to become a labor organizer. He married Myrta Bell in 1907, and then Lewis moved his entire family to the coal town of Panama, Illinois, where he quickly moved up the ranks of

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