Dictionary of Literary Influences

O’Keeffe, Georgia

Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Faulkner sometimes created characters who exhibited insufficient free will. He admired Faulkner’s humor more than his technical innovations, and he valued detective fiction because he felt that it properly emphasized the importance of plot.

Commenting on short fiction, O’Connor mentioned that he had been significantly influenced by Isaac Babel early in his career; that much could be learned from Chekhov if Chekhov was studied correctly; that Coppard was a particularly worthy writer; that Turgenev’s A Sportman’s Sketches “may well be the greatest book of short stories ever written” and that the same author’s “Old Portraits” may be the best story ever penned; that Kipling insufficiently emphasized the theme of human loneliness (which O’Connor regarded as crucial to short fiction); that Mansfield’s stories are mostly forgettable; that Lawrence, along with Coppard, was one of England’s best authors of short fiction; that Hemingway’s stories sometimes fail to balance narrative and drama, and also that Hemingway’s material is often either slight or overblown.

O’Connor’s motives as a reader were clearly self-interested: he read other writers for what they could teach him about literature, whether through their virtues or their alleged errors. He seems to have been influenced, in one way or another, by nearly every text he encountered, and the impact of his reading can be seen not only in his published criticism but also in his own creative writing.

Archives

Important collections are held at Boston University, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Cork Public Museum, Harvard University, the National Library of Ireland, Northwestern University, Stanford University, Trinity College (Dublin), the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Kansas, Manchester University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Toronto, the University of Tulsa, the University of Victoria, and especially the University of Florida.

Printed Sources

Evans, Robert C., and Richard Harp (eds.). Frank O’Connor: New Perspectives (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill, 1998).

Matthews, James. Voices: A Life of Frank O’Connor (New York: Atheneum, 1983). O’Connor, Frank. An Only Child and My Father’s Son (London: Pan Books, 1988).

Sheehy, Maurice (ed.). Michael/Frank: Studies on Frank O’Connor (New York: Knopf, 1969). Tomory, William M. Frank O’Connor (Boston: Twayne, 1980).

Robert C. Evans

O’KEEFFE, GEORGIA (1887–1985)

Georgia O’Keeffe’s career as an artist spanned over half a century. Yet she hardly personified the typical expectations of females; she f latly refused to be defined, and her artistic career, lasting until her death in 1985, spanned cityscapes, abstract art, and paintings ref lecting her intimacy with nature. She claimed that her first memory was of the brightness of light, and many of her paintings represent her focus on the contrast between light and dark. She discovered at the age of eight that she wanted to be an artist, and her parents indulged her talent by sending her to art school. She enrolled at the Art Institute of

400

O’Keeffe, Georgia

Chicago, studying under John Vanderpoel, who taught her that line and shading should be used with the awareness that both represented the external appearance of a complete living entity.

In an attempt to define more narrowly her artistic focus, O’Keeffe attended a summer course at the University of Virginia in 1912 taught by Alon Bement, who, using the theories of Arthur Dow, emphasized the careful arrangement of all elements in a composition and stressed the significance of the relationship between light and dark. O’Keeffe would later write in her autobiography, “It was in the fall of 1915 that I first had the idea that what I had been taught was of little value to me except for the use of my materials as a language. . . . I had become fluent with them when I was so young that they were simply another language that I handled easily. . . . I decided to start anew—to strip away what I had been taught—to accept as true my own thinking” (O’Keeffe 1976, 20). Her paintings began to evolve into an evident tension between light and dark; motion and stasis; and weight and levity, all of which led to a sense of vitality in her art. Vassily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, which Bement had recommended, became her justification for pursuing the intellectual in artistry and for completely breaking with traditional painting conventions.

While in New York in 1917, O’Keeffe met Alfred Stieglitz, whom she would marry in 1924. Coincidentally, since much of her artwork mirrored her life, her paintings in the 1920s featured flowers, perhaps to celebrate her happiness. O’Keeffe would often present a single, centrally-positioned object, many times a flower, enlarged to an unnatural size. Yet she still struggled to find her own way; she had to essentially free herself from Stieglitz’s shadow. She knew that she was an enigma in the art world and that her male peers felt she could not compete with their work or that they did not take her work seriously. Often critics would degrade her work by misconstruing it as sexually based, comparing her flower artistry to human genitalia. She flatly denied any such accusations, despite the sort of sensuality and exotic flavor that her artwork exudes. She believed her art represented the whole psyche, not just one aspect.

O’Keeffe found inspiration in the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, an enthusiasm not shared by Stieglitz, and their emotional separation is reflected in O’Keeffe’s work during the 1930s. Her paintings throughout this period reveal a sense of yearning to reveal nature and often feature isolated animal skulls, painted with wave patterns and zigzag lines. The symbolic juxtaposition of life (flower imagery) and death (skulls) was a dramatic feature of many of her paintings. O’Keeffe rejected the critic’s rather morbid metaphor of death in describing her paintings; to her, these were images of life and happiness.

While O’Keeffe’s career was flourishing in New Mexico, Stieglitz suffered his third heart attack, and died on July 13, 1946, in O’Keeffe’s arms. She spent two years settling their estate in New York and then moved permanently to Abiquiu, New Mexico. After her eyesight began to deteriorate, she enlisted the assistance of a sculptor, Juan Hamilton, as well as Sarah Greenough, a research curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to help preserve elements of her life. After her death in 1985, her ashes were scattered on the grounds of her home by Hamilton, since a proper burial would have been incongruous for the woman who spent her life as an artist attempting to explain the unexplainable.

401

O’Neill, Eugene Gladstone

Archives

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Printed Sources

Benke, Britta. Georgia O’Keeffe, 1887–1986: Flowers in the Desert (Koln: Taschen, 2000). Frazier, Nancy. Georgia O’Keeffe (North Dighton, Mass.: World Publications Group, Inc.,

2001).

Mitchell, Brenda Maria. “Music That Makes Holes in the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Visionary Romanticism” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996).

O’Keeffe, Georgia. Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: The Viking Press, 1976).

Richter, Peter-Cornell. Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (Munich: Prestel Verlag Press, 2001).

Jennifer Harrison

O’NEILL, EUGENE GLADSTONE (1888–1953)

Eugene O’Neill was born in a New York City hotel, the Barrett House. He attended Princeton University (1906–7) before being suspended for misbehavior and Harvard University (1914–15), where he took George Pierce Baker’s famed English 47 workshop but did not matriculate. An intensely autobiographical playwright (his father was the stage actor James O’Neill), O’Neill won four Pulitzer Prizes (one posthumously) and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936. Arguably America’s greatest dramatist and certainly among its most important writers, O’Neill revolutionized American stagecraft in his early career by incorporating European expressionistic techniques into such plays as The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1921) and by using a mixture of Greek myth and Freudian psychoanalysis in Desire Under the Elms (1924) and the Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) trilogy. O’Neill’s later, more classic works, such as The Iceman Cometh (1939) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1941), both masterpieces of tragic psychological realism, solidified his lasting reputation and importance not only to American drama, but to the world.

While O’Neill was often loath to ascribe the influence of other writers on his work, his letters were often explicit on this matter where his plays were merely implicit. He noted early in his career (Bogard and Bryer 1988, 119) his dependence on the good opinion of his former professor, George Pierce Baker. Other early influences include his compatriots in the Experimental Theatre, Inc.: Robert Edmond Jones, whom O’Neill relied on for his expressionistic sets (Bogard and Bryer 1988, 161), and literary critic/producer Kenneth Macgowan, with whom O’Neill frequently and voluminously corresponded on business and artistic matters. In a 1927 letter, O’Neill made perhaps his most explicit declaration of influence, noting the profound impact of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1891) on O’Neill’s play Lazarus Laughed (1926), among other works (Bogard and Bryer 1988, 245). Especially important for this play was Nietzsche’s affirmation of man’s supremacy over God as well as Nietzsche’s theory of the opposition of the Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of human existence. This opposition was also rendered in the plays and short stories of Swedish writer Augustus Strindberg, whose collection Married was cited by O’Neill as an exploration of poverty’s incompatibility with “the dictates of nature,” a contrast often explored to tragic effect in O’Neill’s own work (Bogard and Bryer 1988, 33). This tragic impulse was

402

Oppenheimer, Robert

profoundly echoed in virtually all of O’Neill’s plays, prompting him to defend his tendency of “always seeing things black” by citing several of whom he considered to be the best writers, including Henrik Ibsen, German writer Gerhart Hauptmann, and Russian Leonid Andreyev. Finally, one must include the influences of Aeschylus, from whose The Oresteia trilogy (458 B.C.E.) O’Neill borrowed the mythic structure and interest in the workings of destiny he incorporated in Mourning Becomes Electra, as well as Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic theories O’Neill cited as an “unconscious influence” (Bogard and Bryer 1988, 192).

Archives

Eugene O’Neill Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Conn.: professional and family correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, legal and financial records, personal and professional memorabilia, primarily 1930s to 1950s.

Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J.: 15 autographed manuscripts of O’Neill plays, most of which are first drafts and include preliminary notes (1913–24). Also includes photograph collection and correspondence from throughout O’Neill’s life.

Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House, Danville, Calif.: a large collection of manuscripts, first editions, inscribed books, photographs, correspondence, ephemera, and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill’s diaries, including other materials.

Eugene O’Neill Papers. The Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.: correspondence and manuscripts.

Printed Works

Bogard, Travis, and Jackson R. Bryer (eds.). Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

Ranald, Margaret Loftus. The Eugene O’Neill Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984).

Shaeffer, Louis. O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973).

Todd R. Robinson

OPPENHEIMER, ROBERT (1904–1967)

Robert Oppenheimer was the son of Julius Oppenheimer, a prosperous New York textile importer, and his wife, Ella Friedman, an artist. The cosmopolitan Oppenheimers were nonobservant Jews, and their sons attended the Ethical Culture School of New York. Oppenheimer, a precocious student, excelled in all subjects, mastering several languages, including Latin, Greek, French, and German, and showing particular ability in English and chemistry. After graduation he studied at Harvard University, obtaining a degree in chemistry summa cum laude in three years, carrying a maximum credit load, and auditing still more courses. Now enthralled by physics, Oppenheimer spent 1925–26 at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, England, proving inept at experimentation. Switching to the University of Göttingen, Germany, and the exciting new field of theoretical quantum physics, in March 1927 Oppenheimer received his doctorate. After two years’ postdoctoral study in the United States, Holland, and Switzerland, Oppenheimer accepted a joint teaching appointment at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, Berkeley. An inspiring teacher, Oppenheimer quickly attracted a generation of

403

Oppenheimer, Robert

enthusiastic graduate students to Caltech and Berkeley, which became leading international centers of quantum physics. Although Oppenheimer published extensively on spectra, particles, neutron stars, and black holes, his personal scientific contribution was less outstanding, and he was never a serious contender for a Nobel Prize.

In October 1941 Oppenheimer began fast-neutron research for the United States government in connection with atomic bomb development and one year later became director of the central laboratory for bomb design and development at Los Alamos, New Mexico. In this enormously demanding position Oppenheimer revealed new self-discipline, and his skillful intellectual leadership, capacity to absorb and process information, concern for those working under him, and ability to negotiate the often difficult relationship between individualistic scientists and governmental demands for conformity, became legendary. After the 1945 atomic explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an exhausted Oppenheimer shared his Danish colleague Niels Bohr’s hope that the bomb’s destructiveness might eventually force nations to abandon war. Leaving Los Alamos in late 1945, two years later Oppenheimer became director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, quickly transforming it into the world’s top center for theoretical physics and simultaneously enhancing its existing reputation in humanistic studies. As the most prestigious American adviser to the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer advocated international control of atomic energy and lectured extensively, seeking to enhance popular scientific understanding. In 1953 growing domestic McCarthyist anti-Communist sentiment and some colleagues’ resentment of Oppenheimer’s reluctance to develop a thermonuclear bomb led the American government to withdraw his security clearance, on the grounds that his wartime evasiveness over potential security problems and prewar left-wing and Communist associates, including his brother, a former fiancée, and his wife, had permanently compromised his status. A full-scale inquiry held in 1954 on Oppenheimer’s insistence confirmed this verdict. Although excluded from governmental counsels, Oppenheimer retained his academic position at Princeton until June 1966, dying of cancer in 1967.

From early childhood Oppenheimer read voraciously and omnivorously, a habit his father encouraged by buying him complete sets of any author whose books appealed to him. Although enormously well-read scientifically, Oppenheimer, a latterday Renaissance man, was equally conversant with literature and poetry, an abiding passion, history of all periods and areas, architecture, and philosophy. The adult Oppenheimer acquired Dutch, Italian, and Sanskrit, the latter so that he could read the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita in the original; after the first successful atomic test took place, he recalled its words: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” Politics and contemporary affairs he initially ignored, but in the 1930s when Oppenheimer finally developed an interest in the Left, he read all the writings of Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and other communist theoreticians. Some even suggested that Oppenheimer’s failure to produce any single outstanding personal intellectual contribution to theoretical physics resulted from his compulsion to acquire deep understanding of so many other fields.

Archives

J.Robert Oppenheimer Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Major collection of Oppenheimer’s personal correspondence and manuscripts.

404

Ortega y Gasset, José

Printed Sources

Goodchild, Peter. J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).

Kunetka, James W. Oppenheimer: The Years of Risk (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982).

Schweber, S. S. In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of a Scientist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Smith, Alice Kimball, and Charles Weiner (eds.). Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). Gives much detailed insight into Oppenheimer’s wide reading.

Priscilla Roberts

ORTEGA Y GASSET, JOSÉ (1883–1956)

One of the great thinkers of twentieth-century Spanish letters, José Ortega y Gasset was born in Madrid. His father was a fiction writer and director of an important literary journal, Los Lunes del Imparcial. His mother was from a family of politicians and journalists. It is not surprising that Ortega began reading at age four, 1897, and by 1890 his parents gave him a toy horse after his having memorized the first chapter of Don Quixote. He treasured Honoré de Balzac’s La comédie humaine and works by Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Benito Pérez Galdós. Ortega studied at the Jesuit School in Málaga. At age 21, he became a doctor of philosophy at the University of Madrid and began to write for his father’s journal. Inclined more to ideas and science than to writing, Ortega expressed admiration for French poet Ernest Renan’s philosophy of the importance of reason and truth, elites in societies and democracy, and Saint-Simonian socialism. Ortega declared that Renan’s “books have been with me ever since I was a child.” He also became friends with Miguel de Unamuno at this time. His postdoctoral studies continued for two years at the German Universities of Leipzig, where he studied philology and came in contact with Neokantianism, Berlin, where Ortega studied the life philosophy of Georg Simmel, and Marburg, where he studied the work of Hermann Cohen. He also showed a predilection for Simmel regarding the relationship between man and culture, placing man at the center of philosophy. These were years he supported socialism as a “scientific conception” following Paul Natorp’s concept that only the socialized individual is fully human, and he studied how to apply Kant’s scientific methodologies to a philosophical system of grand synthesis of reason and empiricism. Ortega continued reading other German philosophers such as Oswald Spengler, the physicist Max Born, and the biologist Von Uexkull. In particular, from the works of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900, 1901) and his “philosophy of rigorous science” (1910–11), Ortega extracted the concept of cognitive value of intuition and direct experience. Later in Preface for Germans (1958), Ortega declared that during these years he already felt somehow that the neo-Kantian thought was “contrived . . . profound, serious, acute, full of truth, and nevertheless, without veracity.” He rejected Nietzsche’s “live dangerously!” in favor of Ludovico Ariosto’s more sober “vivere risolutamente!” (live resolutely). Upon his return to Spain in 1910, he taught Metaphysics at the University of Madrid and founded a short-lived party of intellectuals, the League of Political Education. He founded and published Revista de Occidente in 1923 and was a very prolific essayist.

405

Orwell, George

In El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923), Ortega broke away from his neo-Kantian upbringing and began to propound the concept of razón vital; the vital reason that is more flexible and responds to the concrete lived experience of the individual. This tension between pure reason and vital reason (pure vitality) is the essence of the “theme of our time.” From Husserl’s 1927 Yearbooks, Ortega read Martin Heidegger’s ontology of existence theory in Being and Time. In his latest writings, Ortega also attested to an appreciation of Wilhem Dilthey’s “historical reason.” In Historia como sistema (1935), Ortega synthesized Husserl and Dilthey’s ideas into a “vital and historical reason.” A man is the sum of all human experiences as shown by history contrary to a scientifically measurable moment in time.

When the Spanish Civil War began, Ortega moved to France, Holland, Portugal, and later on to Buenos Aires where he occupied an important role in the intellectual circles of Latin America for several decades. He returned to Spain in 1945 to found the Institute de Humanities where he lectured along with his disciple Julián Marías in 1948. Between 1949 and 1951 he lectured also in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland. In his later works from 1933 to his death, Ortega studied the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and the Prague linguistic circle as well as German philosophy of language, and phenomenology, existentialism, structuralist linguistics.

Archives

Fundación Ortega y Gasset, Madrid.

Centro de Estudios Orteguianos, Universidad de la Coruña.

Archivo Histórico Nacional, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.

Printed Sources

Dobson, Andrew. An Introduction to the Politics and Philosophy of José Ortega y Gasset (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Durán, Manuel (ed.). Ortega hoy: Estudio, ensayos, y bibliografía sobre la vida y la obra de José Ortega y Gasset (Xalapa, México: Universidad Veracruzana, 1985).

Ferrater Mora, José. José Ortega y Gasset: An Outline of His Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).

Graham, John Thomas. Theory of History in Ortega y Gasset: The Dawn of Historical Reason

(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997).

Huéscar Rodríguez, A. José Ortega y Gasset’s Metaphysical Innovation: A Critique and Overcoming of Idealism (Albany: University of New York Press, 1995).

Marías, Julián. José Ortega y Gasset, Circumstance and Vocation, Frances M. López-Morillas (trans.), (Norman: Unviersity of Oklahoma Press, 1970).

Orringer, Nelson R. Nuevas fuentes germánicas de ¿Qué es filosofía? de Ortega (Madrid: CSIC, 1979).

Ouimette, Victor. José Ortega y Gasset (Boston: Twayne, 1982).

Silver, Philip W. Ortega as Phenomenologist: The Genesis of “Meditations on Quixote” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).

Andrés Villagrá

ORWELL, GEORGE (1903–1950)

George Orwell, the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, was born at Motihari in Bengal, India, where his father was a civil servant. In 1904 he moved to England with his mother and sister. In 1911 he entered St. Cyprian’s preparatory school,

406

Orwell, George

Eastbourne, winning a scholarship to Wellington College in 1917 and another to Eton later that year. He left Eton in 1921 but instead of going to Oxford or Cambridge like many of his contemporaries, he took the India Office civil service examination. He went to Burma in 1922, serving in the Indian Imperial Police until 1927. He returned to England on leave, decided to stay, and resigned his commission. He felt uncomfortable working in a position of what he saw as oppressive imperial authority.

He determined to turn himself into a writer to make his living. Already writing and politics were linked in his mind. Just for the experience, he lived rough in the East End of London, went on the road with tramps, and worked as a dishwasher in Paris, the sources of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). In 1929 he began to write reviews and literary articles for The Adelphi and later for The New English Weekly and The New Statesman and Nation. His first novel, Burmese Days, was published in 1934, followed by A Clerg yman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up For Air (1939). Financed by the Left Book Club, he traveled through coal-mining areas of northern England in 1936 and published The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), as critical of socialism as of the mine owners. Late in 1936 he went to Spain to join the socialist military party, POUM, fighting Franco’s fascists in the Civil War. He was wounded and returned to England to write an account of his experiences and of socialism and equality in action in Homage to Catalonia (1938). From 1936 to 1941 he wrote reviews for Time & Tide, as many as three a week, and for Horizon. His health deteriorated and following a lung hemorrhage, he was forbidden to work. Coinciding with the outbreak of war in 1939, it contributed to his frustration and depression. From 1941 to 1943 he worked at the BBC Indian section as a radio talks producer, writer, and broadcaster. He left to be literary editor of Tribune. He began writing Animal Farm (1945), although progress was slow because of ill health, his wife’s death, and commitments to the Partisan Review, Manchester Evening News, and The Observer. Animal Farm and later Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) made him rich and famous, and alone would account for his reputation today, but he died too soon to enjoy the rewards.

At the age of eight he had read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a book he found inexhaustible and which he claimed to have reread every year of his life. At St. Cyprian’s he and his friends read together Dickens, Carlyle, Shakespeare, and, inevitably, boys’ weekly magazines filled with adventure stories. They particularly enjoyed H. G. Wells’s The Country of the Blind and Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, not least because these were books to be read literally under cover, away from the eyes of authority. He was instructed in the merits of the Authorized Version of the Bible, and the values of its language were clearly still in his mind when he wrote his 1946 essay on style, “Politics and the English Language.” At Wellington and Eton he studied Greek and Latin literature but his favorite authors were all modern—Jack London, George Bernard Shaw, and Wells. He enjoyed books that took him away from the world he knew—nature in London’s The Call of the Wild and the descriptions of poverty in People of the Abyss. The more imaginative and fantastic the work, the more it appealed to him. Shaw’s plays he liked for their antiestablishment ideas and skepticism. But Orwell’s own growing skepticism eventually led to a certain disillusion with these early favorites, as illustrated by his 1941 essay, “Wells, Hitler and the World State.” Meanwhile he was developing a taste for romantic poetry, especially Shelley, Ernest Dowson, and A. E. Housman.

407

Orwell, George

He memorized A Shropshire Lad, wallowing in the language and the beauty and self-pity of its sentiments. Housman’s defiant paganism and sexual pessimism appealed to him to the point that at the age of 15 he wrote a love poem entitled “The Pagan.” In Burma in his early twenties there was plenty of time for reading. He later recalled the books that made the biggest impression on him at this stage: Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Samuel Butler’s Notebooks, and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. He read English newspapers and magazines when they eventually arrived by the long sea crossing, and he subscribed to John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi monthly. Returning to England, he wrote reviews for a string of literary magazines, the work that made his living. While on the one hand it took time that he might have preferred to devote to writing his own books, on the other it might be seen as a source of literary inspiration. He was forced to read a lot. He learned the difference between good and bad writing. He developed a sense of literary style and refined the no-nonsense writing for which he is now famous.

In the mid-1930s he worked in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead. Not only did this give him the opportunity to read extensively from the stock, but it also showed him how the book market worked and what readers wanted. Increasingly he was aware of books as a commodity and, disillusioned, he turned to old Victorian volumes of the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Cornhill Magazine, The Strand, and, oddly, The Girl’s Own Paper. In them he was intrigued by the way political and other ideas date, the mixture of sincerity and ignorance, and the way yesterday’s burning issues are largely ignored by general history books.

Later in the 1930s in Spain, Orwell not only saw socialism in action, but also experienced the blurring of meaning that abuse of language and distortion of words can cause. He went as a socialist to fight against fascism but found communism fighting under the name of socialism and in reality fighting against socialist principles. Far from bringing about social revolution the communists were conservative, determined to grab and hold on to power. Animal Farm is about that abuse of power and the betrayal of good intentions, notably the principle of equality. Anxious to save socialism from communism and totalitarianism, he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, a warning about the suppression of individual freedom in the quest for power for its own sake. It is a book about contradictions, not least the distortion of language. The influences behind these two books go back to his youth. Even at Eton he was engaging in debate with Marxists, and throughout his reviewing career he was drawn to writings on power, power politics, and the abuse of power. He knew Jack London’s The Iron Heel and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In 1939 he reviewed Bertrand Russell’s Power: A New Social Analysis, and in a 1940 review of Jack Hilton’s English Ways he wrote “If there is hope it lies in the proles,” a sentiment repeated in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the early 1940s he had read Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin’s 1923 futuristic fantasy novel, We, which inspired him to begin making notes for his own book. He read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and in 1946 wrote at length on James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. This was perhaps the strongest influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four, inspiring Orwell to one of his sharpest critical attacks on power. He argued that what seems powerful today is often, because of its ambition and apparent strength, overthrown tomorrow. His argument in the essay, as in his novel, is that the common man will prevail.

In the 1946 essay “Why I Write,” Orwell describes his early determination to become a writer and his joy in words, sounds, and their associations. Writing

408

Osborne, John

became a way to take revenge on his other failures in life. Not to write was to outrage his true nature. He identifies four driving forces in his writing: egoism, pleasure in words, the historical impulse to record the truth, and the political impulse to push the world in a particular direction. His experiences in Spain had changed his outlook, and afterward his thinking and writing took a new and more seriously political turn. His hatred of authority was strengthened by those experiences, and thereafter he concentrated his writing attention against totalitarianism and toward democratic socialism. He was pessimistic because he recognized that there is something in human nature that seeks violence, conflict, and power over others. He determined to make political writing into an art to expose deceit, while caring deeply about prose style and scraps of seemingly useless information. He loved the construction of language and the nature of truth in words. Both Homage to Catalonia and Nineteen Eighty-Four contain chapters about the distortion of truth through the manipulation of words. Orwell was committed to the exact use of words and increasingly in his later work he fused that artistic purpose with political purpose.

Archives

University College London, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, has the Orwell Archive containing manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, editions including translations, journalism, books from his library, and secondary materials.

BBC Written Archive, Caversham Park, Reading, has correspondence, typescripts, radio scripts, and details of programs Orwell organized, arranged, and produced.

Printed Sources

Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980).

Fenwick, Gillian. George Orwell: A Bibliography (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1998). Myers, Jeffrey. George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1975).

Orwell, George. Complete Works of George Orwell, Peter Davison (ed.), 20 vols. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986–98). Includes essays on each work.

Shelden, Michael. Orwell: The Authorised Biography (London: Heinemann, 1991).

Gillian Fenwick

OSBORNE, JOHN (1929–1994)

John Osborne was born in Fulham, London. The son of an advertising copywriter, Osborne attended St. Michael’s school and was expelled at age 16 for speaking derisively of the royal family and for an altercation with the headmaster. He arrived on the national scene in 1956 with the debut of his play Look Back in Anger about the frustrations and conflicts of a working-class man and his middle-class wife. In that work and in 1957’s The Entertainer, Osborne launched a blistering attack on the class system, moral hypocrisy, and nostalgia for imperial glories. The plays made him the first of the “angry young men” of mid-twentieth-century English drama, and throughout his career, he was at his best depicting alienation, not only from society but also in intimate relationships.

Osborne recorded that while a teenager, he had been prompted to read Oscar Wilde’s plays by his grandfather’s “prurient obsession” with that author. The young Osborne soon moved on to Wilde’s other works, such as The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Soul of Man under Socialism. That last book led him to the writings of

409