Dictionary of Literary Influences

Nijinsky, Vaslav

foreign-relations council (1945–56). Convinced of the Germans’ collective guilt, he played a crucial role in drafting the Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis (Stuttgart Confession of Guilt) in 1945 and became a controversial pacifist and internationalist. He served as a president of the World Council of Churches from 1961 to 1968.

Martin Niemöller’s faith was Protestant, steeped in the Reformation, and highly conscious of his Reformed roots as embodied in the teachings and lives of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli. The teachings of his mother regarding the sufferings of their forefathers, especially the French Huguenots, and the reality of living in the dominantly Catholic areas of the Rhineland and Westphalia fermented in Niemöller an anti-Catholic bias. For the young Niemöller, piety implied Protestantism and German nationalism inextricably intertwined and shaped by an anti-intellectualism that stressed the spiritual life over theological studies. Following in his father’s footsteps, he was deeply drawn to the “social question”—the plight of the working class. Influenced by Pastor Johann Hinrich Wichern’s German “Inner Mission,” formed in 1848, and the self-proclaimed Christian Socialist Adolf Stöcker, Niemöller was increasingly drawn to the Social Gospel. His experiences during World War I fortified his passionate nationalism, and his desire to see Germany return to greatness led to his initial support of the Nazis. However, Nazi infringement on the autonomy of the church and the ever-increasing virulence of the Nazi’s anti-Semitism led Niemöller to assist in the formation of the Young Reformation Movement in 1933. It is through this forum that Niemöller influenced and was influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth, the latter becoming a lifelong friend and theological mentor. After World War II, Niemöller became an outspoken internationalist and political pacifist strongly influenced by Frédéric Joliot-Curie’s world peace movement and Mohandas Gandhi’s technique of nonviolent protest embodied in “provoking peacefully.” Central to his postwar stance was a keen interest in the state of Russia, attacking racism and poverty internationally, and promoting nuclear disarmament.

Archives

Das Zentralarchiv und die Zentralbibliothek der Evangelischen Kirche in Hessen und Nassau, Darmstadt, Germany: Niemöller’s personal papers, correspondence, works, and sermons as well as letters, documents, and publications relating to the church in general.

Printed Sources

Bentley, James. Martin Niemöller: 1892–1984 (New York: The Free Press, 1984). Davidson, Clarissa S. God’s Man: The Story of Pastor Niemoeller, reprint ed. (Westport, Conn.:

Greenwood Press, 1979).

Helmreich, Ernst Christian. The German Churches Under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979).

Rouven J. Steeves

NIJINSKY, VASLAV (1889–1950)

Vaslav Nijinsky was born in Kiev to two Polish dancers, Thomas and Eleanora, who toured throughout Russia and were his first dance teachers. At age nine, Nijinsky was accepted as a student into the Imperial Theatrical School, where his phenomenal talent quickly became evident. Before Nijinsky was elevated to solo status

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at the Maryinsky Ballet in 1907, the St. Petersburg press had already proclaimed him a prodigy. In 1909, Serge Diaghilev, whose goal was to introduce Russian art and dance to the West, convinced Nijinsky to join his fledgling Ballets Russes in its first Paris season. Nijinsky’s sensational dancing in Le Spectre de la Rose made him an overnight idol. His role as the Golden Slave in Scheherazade (1910) contributed to both his fame and that of the Ballets Russes, which for 20 years stood as the ultimate symbol of sophistication and artistic innovation in the West. Critics wrote that Nijinsky’s technical virtuosity transcended the limits of what seemed physically possible; this extraordinary athleticism combined with his mimetic ability enabled Nijinsky to establish the centrality of the male classical dancer. Nijinsky choreographed three ballets, L’Apres-midi d’une Faune (1912), Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), and Jeux (1913), that radically broke with the tenets of classical ballet and ushered ballet into modernism. All provoked a scandalous, critical response. While the twodimensional movements of the dancers in Faune reflected the geometric shapes of cubist art, it was the final masturbatory gesture of Nijinsky’s faun that shocked the audience and added to the atmosphere of decadence and daring that surrounded the artist. The dissonance of Igor Stravinsky’s music, the violent stomping of the dancers, and the visual primitivism of the sets made the opening performance of Le Sacre a hallmark of modernism and created a riot in the audience. Jeux, too, with its modern dress and sexual theme, offended bourgeois sensibilities. A hasty marriage to Romola de Pulszky in 1913 led to his dismissal from the Ballets Russes. Nijinsky then formed his own dance troupe. In 1916–17, Nijinsky toured with Diaghilev’s enterprise throughout the United States once more before succumbing to the schizophrenia that cut short his brilliant career. At the time of his tragic retirement at the end of 1917, Nijinsky was the most celebrated dancer in the world and is still considered the greatest male dancer of the twentieth century.

Off stage Nijinsky rarely talked, was socially incompetent, and even seemed simple-minded, fueling the legend of his being an idiot savant, a naive genius. His academic record at school was dismal, and his younger sister Bronislava Nijinsky, who turned into a noted ballerina, often tutored him in his general studies. Yet he had a perfect ear for music, memorizing entire scores of the operas that played at the Maryinsky. At the time of his graduation from the Imperial Theatrical School, he received the complete works of Lev Tolstoy. On his 1917 American tour, he fell under the spell of Dmitri Kostrovsky, another dancer, who espoused the religious philosophy of Tolstoy. Nijinsky embraced some of Tolstoy’s teachings, including vegetarianism, pacifism, and anarchism. He began wearing peasant shirts and practicing sexual celibacy. Nijinsky’s diary, written in six weeks in a secluded villa in Switzerland, revealed that he read not only Tolstoy, but also Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and was generally familiar with Russian literature. He began his descent into madness at this time, so it is difficult to separate Tolstoy’s influence from his inner demons. Nijinsky imagined that he was God, expressed his desire to return to Russia, and echoed the nineteenth-century sentiment of the Slavophiles that Russia will be the world’s spiritual center (the Third Rome). He also compared himself to Dostoyevsky’s hero in the The Idiot and cited passages about salvation from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. His references to Gogol, Guy de Maupassant, and Friedrich Nietzsche seemed self-prophetic, since they too suffered nervous breakdowns. The diary, heavily edited by his wife, was published in 1936. An unexpurgated version appeared in 1999.

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Archives

Gabriel Astruc Papers, Dance Collection, Lincoln Center, New York Public Library, New York.

Serge Diaghilev Papers and Correspondence, Dance Collection, Lincoln Center, New York Public Library, New York.

Boris Kochno Papers, Bibliotheque de l’Opera, Paris. Nijinsky Archives, Phoenix, Arizona.

Printed Sources

Benois, Alexandre. Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, Mary Britnieva (trans.), (London: Chatto and Windus, 1941).

Buckle, Richard. Nijinsky (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971).

Garafola, Lynn. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Nijinska, Bronislava. Early Memoirs (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981). Nijinsky, Vaslav. The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, Kyril FitzLyon (trans.), Joan Acocella (ed.),

(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

Ostwald, Peter. Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness (New York: Carol Publishing, 1991).

Ulle V. Holt

NIXON, RICHARD MILHOUS (1913–1994)

Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California. He attended Whittier College and Duke University Law School. From 1946 to 1950 he served in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was instrumental in exposing the communist traitor Alger Hiss. He went on to enter the U.S. Senate in 1950 and later served as vice president from 1952 to 1960. Nixon won the presidency in 1968. He engaged in a complex game of geopolitics to exploit cracks in the communist bloc, fashioning an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union, developing a diplomatic opening to China, and withdrawing troops from Vietnam. Reelected in 1972, he resigned two years later because of his involvement in a series of scandals collectively known as “Watergate.”

He read diligently throughout his life. He developed a childhood fascination with National Geographic; though his family was too poor to afford it, he read a neighbor’s copy. An interest in travel and a taste for reading periodical literature would serve him well: he would spend much of his adult life doing both. Of course during his political career, Nixon consumed a vast and constant diet of newspapers and news magazines. Nixon’s own books also show a wide range of reading in political philosophy, referring to Thomas Hobbes, Niccolo Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, and others.

Appropriately for a budding politician, he also read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People while a youth. While in school he studied Latin literature and French literature. During his undergraduate studies at Whittier College, he read steadily and seriously and would continue to do so throughout his life. In addition, he developed a strong affection for the works of Lev Tolstoy; an interesting taste, since Tolstoy, particularly in the character of Marshal Kutuzov in War and Peace, presents a picture of the world in which human beings have a limited role in controlling the outcome of great events.

By contrast, Nixon also displayed a strong interest in the stories of great men performing great deeds. Throughout his career Nixon exhibited a fondness for the

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writings and speeches of Theodore Roosevelt. One quotation in particular recurs throughout Nixon’s writings, in which Roosevelt praises the “man in the arena” and disparages critics. Nixon referred to the quotation in his memoirs and used part of it as the title of his book In the Arena. The quotation held obvious appeal for one who spent so much time in the arena and was hounded by such a vast army of critics. In addition, during his farewell speech to the White House staff in August 1974, Nixon paid tribute to his own deceased mother by quoting from a tribute that Roosevelt wrote upon the death of his first wife. He then contrasted the loss that Roosevelt expressed with his future political triumphs, attempting to sound a note of hope and renewal in one of his darkest hours.

British guerrilla warfare expert Sir Robert Thompson exercised a strong influence on Nixon. Thompson wrote about the successful counterinsurgency program conducted by the British during the 12-year (1948–60) struggle to root out communist guerrillas in Malaya. An example of a successful counterinsurgency campaign against communist guerrilla forces in Asia held obvious interest for Nixon during his first term, as Nixon struggled to end the Vietnam War on his own terms. Nixon showed a strong interest in Thompson and his work; in his memoirs, however, Nixon never states explicitly whether he read Thompson’s books, but he mentions several meetings with Thompson in which the guerrilla warfare expert urged him to display the resolve to stay the course to final victory in Vietnam.

Nixon also drew inspiration from other periods of British history. One of Nixon’s favorite books was Robert Blake’s Disraeli. Nixon received the biography of the nineteenth-century statesman as a gift from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and his copy of the book is displayed at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California. Nixon relished the story of the triumphant conservative prime minister of Great Britain scoring domestic and international triumphs. In particular, Nixon admired Disraeli’s successful passage of the Reform Bill of 1867; by passing that bill, Disraeli, the conservative statesman, succeeded where his liberal opponents had failed. Nixon would describe his diplomatic opening to China in similar terms.

In his retirement Nixon continued a vigorous reading program. In particular he enjoyed Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, a history of much of the twentieth century from a conservative perspective. And he continued to show a strong interest in British history, reading Martin Gilbert’s mammoth biography of Sir Winston S. Churchill, another statesman who proved of profound and perpetual interest to Nixon.

Archives

Richard Nixon Library, Yorba Linda, California. Includes preand postpresidential papers, along with a collection of books and photographs.

National Archives, College Park, Maryland. Houses the Nixon presidential materials.

Printed Sources

Aitken, Jonathan. Nixon, A Life (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1993). Ambrose, Stephen E. Nixon, 3 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987–89). Crowley, Monica. Nixon in Winter (New York: Random House, 1998).

———. Nixon Off the Record (New York: Random House, 1996).

Nixon, Richard. In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).

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———. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978).

Reeves, Richard. President Nixon: Alone in the White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

Mitchell McNaylor

NUREYEV, RUDOLPH (1938–1993)

Nureyev was born into a Tatar, Muslim family from the Urals and raised in Ufa, the capital of the Bashkir Autonomous Republic, U.S.S.R. Educated in Russian and English at Ufa’s School Number Two, where he was an indifferent student, Nureyev began his formal ballet instruction at the age of 10. At 17, he was accepted into the prestigious Vaganova Choreographic Institute in Leningrad, and at 21, he landed the starring role of the slave in the Kirov Ballet’s “Le Corsaire,” electrifying the Soviet dance world with his sexual magnetism and flamboyant technique. Nureyev quickly rose to the highest ranks of the Soviet ballet system. During the height of the cold war in 1961, he defected to the West for personal and artistic liberty while on a state-sponsored tour to promote Soviet cultural supremacy. His defection unleashed an international media furor, embarrassed the Soviet Union, made him a political symbol, and fueled his fame as an international celebrity. Dazzling audiences with his exotic looks and brilliant leaps, he reignited the career of Margot Fonteyn, elevated the prominence of the male dancer, and transformed ballet from an elite art form to a middle-class pastime. When the 20-year-old Nureyev partnered the 43-year-old Fonteyn, the Royal Ballet’s prima ballerina, in Giselle in his Covent Garden debut (February 21, 1962), their performance sparked a boom in British ballet and launched a golden partnership that lasted for twelve years. The two were feted by diplomatic and social circles and were lionized by the press and the public. For 20 years he was a top box office draw in the major ballet companies in the West. Nureyev not only worked with classical choreographers such as Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine, but he also ventured into the field of modern dance by performing for Martha Graham and Paul Taylor. His appearance on the American Ed Sullivan Show attracted a record 52 million viewers. In 1983, he became artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet.

While a student at the Vaganova, Nureyev was greatly influenced by two teachers, Nikolai Ivanovsky and Maria Marietta Frangopulo, who tutored him in the history of ballet. He became a voracious reader, devouring the works of Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He also developed his lifelong passion for art and art history with frequent visits to the Hermitage Museum. Later when he started to choreograph, he visualized each dancer as a painting on the stage. It was during this time that he discovered J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a book censored by the Soviets; as an outsider due to his Tatar heritage and homosexual leanings, he identified with Holden Caulfield, whose rebellious stance mirrored his own dissatisfaction with a puritanical, repressive Soviet society.

In 1966, Nureyev embarked on his choreographic career, making dramatic innovations in Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty, the embodiment of the classical repertoire of the Maryinsky and Kirov Ballets. He had the sets painted to reflect the splendor of Versailles, and he spent months researching the court of the Sun King by reading the memoirs of Count de Saint-Simon. He added several male

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solos to the revised production, as well as using subdued shades of browns, blacks, and golds on the staging to suggest a masculine elegance. In 1976, when he created his own version of Romeo and Juliet, he turned to Shakespeare’s play for inspiration, studying not only Shakespeare’s text, but also the stories on which the master built his play. The result was a ballet that highlighted the violence of medieval Verona and stressed the sexual lustiness between the two young lovers, a break from the original, chastely Victorian production. Nureyev fashioned Juliet as a willful tomboy, a reference to the custom of Shakespeare’s times when boys played all the female parts. A year later he constructed a ballet, Manfred, loosely based on Lord Byron’s poem with the same name. Like Byron, Nureyev was a genius with a turbulent sexual history. The ballet was set to Peter Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony. The central role, danced by Nureyev, was a romantic figure, tormented by the contradictions between sacred and profane love. Despite the technical virtuosity of the dancing, this ballet had disappointing reviews and revenues. In 1986, Nureyev created one final ballet around a literary work, Washington Square, titled after Henry James’s novella. Charles Ives composed the musical score and Nureyev danced the part of the heiress’s father.

Archives

Archive of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Moscow.

Russian State Military Archive, Moscow.

Printed Sources

Bland, Alexander. Fonteyn and Nureyev: The Story of A Partnership (New York: Times Books, 1979).

Houseal, Joseph. “Nureyev in the West,” Ballet Review 22, 1 (Spring 1994), 32–40. Interview with Maude Gosling.

Nureyev, Rudolph. Nureyev (New York: E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1963).

Percival, John. Nureyev: Aspects of the Dance (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975). Solway, Diane. Nureyev: His Life (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1998).

Stuart, Otis. Perpetual Motion: The Public and Private Lives of Rudolph Nureyev (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

Ulle V. Holt

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O’CONNOR, FLANNERY (1925–1964)

Flannery O’Connnor was born in Savannah, Georgia, but lived much of her life in the small town of Milledgeville, Georgia, where she graduated from the Women’s College of Georgia in 1945. She received an M.F.A. in 1947 from the renowned writers’ program of the University of Iowa. During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s she established a growing reputation as a writer of fiercely funny but deeply provocative short stories, and she also produced two novels. All of her writing—including her exceptionally interesting letters—show the influence of her abiding commitment to Christianity, particularly to Roman Catholicism. This commitment helped her deal with the growing ravages of lupus, which had already killed her father when O’Connor was a teenager and which kept O’Connor herself largely confined to her mother’s farm in Milledgeville during the most productive years of her life. Along with writing, reading was one of O’Connor’s great passions and consolations. Her work is haunted by intimations not only of fleshly mortality but also of spiritual transcendence.

The indispensable guide to O’Connor’s reading is Arthur Kinney’s Flannery O’Connor’s Library, although much useful information can also be gleaned from other sources, including O’Connor’s own correspondence in The Habit of Being; letters she exchanged with the Brainerd Chaineys; her interviews; her occasional prose; and her book reviews. O’Connor was a voracious, active, and often highly opinionated reader, as her reviews, letters, and marginalia show. Kinney indicates which pages of the books he lists contain markings, and often he gives brief representative quotations of the passages O’Connor marked. As might be expected, the Bible was a crucial text, and writings by Catholic authors were also especially prominent in O’Connor’s library, particularly works by Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Dante, Martin C. D’Arcy, Dom Aelred Graham, Romano Guardini, Baron Friedrich von Hügel, Saint John of the Cross, Ronald Knox, William F. Lynch, François Mauriac, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, John Henry Cardinal

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Newman, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Edith Stein, and Claude Tresmontant. Guardini, Hügel, and Teilhard were unusually important.

Other authors in whom O’Connor took a particularly strong interest included Joseph Warren Beach, Henri Bergson, Louis Bouyer, Martin Buber, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Raymond Hostie, Henry James, Madison Jones, Carl Jung, Russell Kirk, Percy Lubbock, Emmanuel Mounier, Stephen C. Pepper, Katherine Anne Porter, Charles Raven, Alexis de Tocqueville, Eric Voegelin, and Victor White. Copies of their books were often extensively marked. Meanwhile, her letters reveal her intense interest in a number of other authors, especially Elizabeth Bishop, Cleanth Brooks, Truman Capote, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, Etienne Gilson, Graham Greene, John Hawkes, Ernest Hemingway, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Randall Jarrell, Samuel Johnson, Franz Kafka, Wyndham Lewis, Elizabeth and Robert Lowell, Andrew Lytle, Mary McCarthy, Carson McCullers, Bernard Malamud, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O’Connor, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Marcel Proust, Muriel Spark, Jean Stafford, Allen Tate, Peter Taylor, Paul Tillich, Robert Penn Warren, Evelyn Waugh, Simone Weil, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and even Dr. Frank Crane, an advice columnist whom O’Connor found endlessly amusing.

Archives

The Flannery O’Connor Collection, Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, Georgia. Contains copies of many (probably most) of the surviving books from O’Connor’s personal library. Many of these are marked and/or annotated.

Printed Sources

DiRenzo, Anthony. American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993).

Flannery O’Connor Bulletin. Milledgeville, Georgia. Vols. 1–27, 1972–2000. Renamed Flannery O’Connor Review, effective Fall 2001.

Getz, Lorine M. Flannery O’Connor: Her Life, Library, and Book Reviews (New York: E. Mellen Press, 1980). Largely superseded by Kinney’s volume and by the volume edited by Zuber and Martin.

Giannone, Richard. Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

Kessler, Edward. Flannery O’Connor and the Language of Apocalypse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Kinney, Arthur F. Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).

Montgomery, Marion. Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home (LaSalle, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden, 1981).

O’Connor, Flannery. Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, Rosemary M. Magee (ed.), ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987).

———.The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys, C. Ralph Stevens (ed.), ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1986).

———.The Habit of Being: Letters, Sally Fitzgerald (ed.), (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979).

———.Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (eds.), (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969).

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———. The Presence of Grace, and Other Book Reviews, Leo J. Zuber and Carter W. Martin (comp. and ed.), (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983).

Robert C. Evans

O’CONNOR, FRANK (1903–1966)

Born Michael Francis O’Donovan in Cork, Ireland, he adopted his pen name in the 1920s so that his sometimes-controversial writings would not threaten his means of earning a conventional livelihood (for a time as a librarian) in a country that was often both politically and religiously intolerant. Although a highly bookish and imaginative only child of poor parents (including a father he sometimes feared and a mother he always adored), O’Connor did not shrink from either literal or literary combat. He served the Republican cause during the Civil War but was often highly critical of the Republic it produced, and he later battled metaphorically on behalf of a variety of social and literary ideals. An avid reader and prolific writer (of novels, nonfiction, poetry, and especially short fiction), by the end of his life he was widely regarded as one of the best writers of short stories in Ireland and indeed the world. His writing was well-informed by his reading, although he sought to give his stories the sound of a true speaking voice and to avoid “literary” artifice and contrivance.

Many of O’Connor’s opinions about writers are easily available in four of his own books: Towards an Appreciation of Literature (1945), The Art of the Theatre (1947), The Mirror in the Roadway: A Study of the Modern Novel (1956), and The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1963). He also produced a highly idiosyncratic study of Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s Progress) and a survey of Irish literature called The Backward Look. He wrote extensively on James Joyce (a contemporary whose importance he appreciated but whose writings he sometimes disliked) and on William Butler Yeats (who influenced him both as a writer and as a mentor). He offered opinions on such varied writers as AE (George Russell), Sherwood Anderson, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Robert Browning, Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, A. E. Coppard, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert, André Gide, Nikolai Gogol, Lady Gregory, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Kavanagh, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Lavin, D. H. Lawrence, Nikolai Leskov, Katherine Mansfield, Guy de Maupassant, George Moore, Liam O’Flaherty, Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Anne Porter, J. F. Powers, J. D. Salinger, William Saroyan, George Bernard Shaw, Stendhal, Gertrude Stein, James Stephens, Jonathan Swift, J. M. Synge, William Thackeray, Lev Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope, Ivan Turgenev, and Virginia Woolf, among many others. He personally knew and closely read many of the important writers of his day, particularly Irish authors or authors anywhere of short fiction, and he brought to all his reading a passionate conviction about the importance of literature to the wider community. This conviction is evident also in his various translations, particularly of ancient Irish poets.

Among novelists, O’Connor admired Austen for treating moral problems realistically; he deeply admired many nineteenth-century writers, especially from England and Russia; he found Thackeray full of intriguing contradictions; and he particularly esteemed Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. At the same time, he was suspicious of the overemphasis on clever artistry sometimes exhibited by such novelists as Flaubert, Joyce, and Henry James, and he felt that modern novelists such as

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