Dictionary of Literary Influences

Rathenau, Walther

writers who created nonmystic and noncollectivist works, such as the playwright Edmond Rostand, Walter Scott, and her lifetime favorite, Victor Hugo, as well as the general body of texts in Western political philosophy. Perhaps, as Michael Berliner suggests, an often overlooked but seminal influence in Rand’s writings is the screenplays she read, edited, and enacted during her initial experiences in Hollywood.

Archives

The Ayn Rand Institute, Marina del Rey, California.

The Library of Congress—Manuscript Division. Donation from Leonard Peikoff, drafts, typescripts, and galley proofs of We the Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, plus some administrative material.

Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, California.

Printed Sources

Binswanger, Harry (ed.). The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z (New York: Meridian, 1988).

Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Doubleday, 1986).

Gladstein, Mimi. The Ayn Rand Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984). Paxton, Michael. Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life (Layton, Utah: Gibbs-Smith, 1998).

Peikoff, Leonard. “My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir.” In The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (New York: Meridian, 1990).

Rand, Ayn. The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (New York: World, 1969); rev. [expanded] ed. (New York: Signet, 1975).

———. Russian Writings on Hollywood, Michael S. Berliner (ed.), Dina Garmong (trans.), (Los Angeles: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1999). Essays by A. Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand).

Tucille, Jerome. It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand: A Libertarian Odyssey (New York: Stein and Day, 1971).

Dana Milstein

RATHENAU, WALTHER (1867–1922)

Walther Rathenau was born in Berlin and remained a Berlin resident for most of his life. He received his Abitur in 1885 from the Königlichen Wilhems Gymnasium and studied physics, chemistry, and philosophy at the Universities of Berlin and Strasbourg between 1886 and 1889. In 1890, Rathenau received additional training in chemistry at the Technischen Hochschüle in Munich. His most valued educational experience was as an officer candidate with a cavalry regiment in Berlin in 1890–91. Rathenau desired a career as an officer, but the German military excluded Jews from becoming officers. Instead, he studied industrial sciences anticipating controlling his father’s business, Germany’s first electrical company, but Rathenau’s mother encouraged him to pursue literature, history, and philosophy. Rathenau developed into a true Renaissance man; he was an influential businessman, a prolific author, and a member of Berlin’s cultural elite. Rathenau’s greatest contribution was as an eloquent commentator on German–Jewish relations during a time when anti-Semitism grew into a permanent feature of German society. Rathenau passionately advocated Jewish assimilation into the German state. He revered his Prussian roots but quickly realized that even educated Jews like himself would never be accepted until Germany evolved into a meritocracy. The majority of

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Rathenau’s writings delineated an ideal society in which the personal and collective “soul” of German citizens could develop unencumbered by artificial boundaries like class. The key threat to the soul’s development was “mechanization,” the amalgamation of the world into a net of production and world trade.

The only author Rathenau quoted directly was St. Paul (Kessler 1969, 81), but Rathenau had a myriad of literary influences. Rathenau developed his vision in three books published between 1912 and 1918. His most important influence was Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), whose articulation of a Spartan–Prussian spirit and description of a “perfect society” in The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806) and Addresses to the German Nation (1808) inspired Rathenau’s vision of the “realm of the soul.” Rathenau was also an avid reader of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886) helped Rathenau argue his point that humanity’s potential mattered more than tradition and binding social standards. Rathenau was attracted to Benedict de Spinoza’s (1632–77) Ethics (1678) because of its conception of God as an infinite substance and humans as transitory manifestations. An avid devotee to Prussian classicism and a frequent traveler to Greece, Rathenau admired Greek philosophy but was especially interested in Plato’s (428–347 B.C.) Republic (360 B.C.). To complement the Prussian influences in his work, Rathenau also explored the Jewish side of his personality. Rathenau was influenced by Jewish mysticism, specifically Hassidism, because the movement advocated exploring the soul. Rathenau befriended Jewish mysticism’s young historian, Martin Buber (1878–1965). Buber’s seminal work, I and Thou (1923), remains the best interpretation of Hassidism. A victim of the anti-Semitism he fought to eradicate, Rathenau was assassinated in 1922 by right-wing extremists soon after accepting the post of foreign minister in the Weimar government.

Archives

Nachlass Walther Rathenau, N 1048, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, Germany. Contains official and unofficial correspondence, including drafts of writings from different periods of his life.

Printed Sources

Berglar, Peter. Walther Rathenau: Seine Zeit, sein Werk, sein Persönlichkeit (Bremen: Schünemann, 1970).

Kessler, Harry Count. Walther Rathenau: His Life and Work (New York: Fertig, 1969). Rathenau, Walther. Walther Rathenau—Industrialist, Banker, Intellectual, and Politician: Notes

and Diaries, 1907–1922, Hartmut Pogge (ed.), (New York: Clarendon Press, 1985).

Brian Crim

REAGAN, RONALD (1911– )

Ronald Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois. He was an active member of the Christian Church throughout his childhood and graduated from Eureka College, a liberal arts institution founded by the Disciples of Christ in Eureka, Illinois. He served two terms as governor of California before he was elected fortieth president of the United States. President Reagan’s two terms in office have been dubbed “The Reagan Revolution” because of the many political and economic changes he initiated. He revived the Republican Party with his campaign promises to lower taxes, shrink government, and establish an aggressively anti-Communist foreign

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policy. He maintained his dedication to these core principles throughout his presidency, and though some critics have characterized his tactics as shortsighted, it is generally recognized that his Economic Recovery Act revived a depressed U.S. economy and his aggressive foreign policy contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. His political rhetoric appealed to traditional middle-class conservative values of patriotism, religious piety, personal initiative, and economic progress.

Reagan in his second autobiography recalls that he learned to read at an early age and was “already a bookworm of sorts” by the time he entered the first grade. “I remember my father coming into the house one day before I’d entered school and finding me on the living room floor with the newspaper in front of me” (Reagan 1990, 25). He was an avid reader of news periodicals throughout his life and describes a morning routine in the White House that began with the New York Times and the Washington Post (Reagan 1990, 249). He often cited Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in describing his youth in Dixon, Illinois. A “voracious reader,” young Reagan consumed books on wildlife, such as Northern Lights, which he “read over and over, imagining myself with the wolves in the wild” (Reagan 1990, 31), and he especially enjoyed books with fictional heroes, particularly the Rover Boys books. He cites Frank Merriwell at Yale and Brown of Harvard as “books about college life, with exciting stories about Ivy League life and gridiron rivalries . . . my childhood dream was to become like those guys in the books” (Reagan 1990, 32). Reagan recalled that at age 12 his mother’s copy of That Printer of Udell’s by Harold Bell Wright inspired him to be baptized as a Disciple of Christ. He told his authorized biographer the book had a profound influence on him and “made him a practical Christian” (Morris 1999, 40). Subtitled A Story of the Middle West, the novel is a morality tale of a boy who overcomes poverty and an alcoholic father to revive his community and become its leading spokesman. The novel’s last scene depicts the protagonist kneeling in prayer before pursuing his ambition in Washington, D.C. Morris conjectures, “The book’s larger themes of self-indul- gence versus practical Christianity, of institutional apathy yielding to passion, of oratory as a tool and private values as public policy, unmistakably nurtured the embryo president” (Morris 1999, 42). A long-time Democrat, Reagan registered with the Republican Party in 1962 when he felt “the liberal Democrats wanted to rein in the energy of free enterprise and capitalism, create a welfare state, and impose a subtle kind of socialism” (Reagan 1990, 134). He supported Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and felt “his book, Conscience of a Conservative, contained a lot of the same points I’d been making in my speeches” (Reagan 1990, 138). Reagan became increasingly critical of what he felt was federal government’s encroachment on state powers, often quoting Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in his attempts to return decision-making authority to what he termed “the grassroots level.” Reagan’s hand was on his mother’s Bible when he took his first presidential oath of office, and in fact his childhood association with the Bible probably contributed to his effective rhetorical skills. Ritter and Henry identify Reagan’s use of the “jeremiad” sermon structure and attribute the power of his political speeches to his “skill at adapting this old Puritan sermon form to contemporary campaigning” (Ritter and Henry 1992, 38). The jeremiad’s three distinct parts are the promise, the declension, and the prophesy. Reagan’s frequent use of apocalyptic imagery in later life is examined by Pierard and Linder (1988, 257–83).

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Archives

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California. Material from Reagan’s presidential years.

Ronald Reagan Collection, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University. Papers and transcripts from eight years as governor of California.

Ronald Reagan Files, Dixon Public Library, Dixon, Illinois. News clippings, student yearbooks, material from his youth in and visits to Dixon.

Printed Sources

Bosch, Adriana. Reagan: An American Story (New York: TV Books, 1998). Extensive use of primary sources and fastidious citation.

Morris, Edmond. Dutch (New York: Random House, 1999). Detailed but impressionistic, authorized biography.

Pierard, Richard, and Robert Linder. Civil Religion and the Presidency (Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 1988). Introduction to Reagan’s religious background, beliefs, and practices.

Reagan, Ronald. An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).

———.I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald Reagan to Nancy Reagan (New York: Random House, 2000).

———.Reagan, In His Own Hand, Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson (eds.), (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). Essays, short stories, notations, and speech transcripts from 1925 to 1994.

Reagan, Ronald, and Richard Hubler. Where’s the Rest of Me? (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearse, 1965).

Ritter, Kurt, and David Henry. Ronald Reagan: The Great Communicator (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992). Thoughtful analysis of Reagan’s speech rhetoric that suggests biblical influences.

Richard N. Swanson

REMARQUE, ERICH MARIA (1898–1970)

Erich Maria Remarque, Erich Paul Remark by birth, was born in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, one of four children, to Peter Franz Remark a bookbinder and former captain of the German Merchant Marine and his wife, Anna Maria, née Stallknecht. He grew up in a devoutly religious home, receiving a Catholic education at the Domschule (1904–8) and Johannisschule (1908–12), followed by a Catholic Preparatory School (1912–15) in Osnabrück, which prepared him for the career of an elementary school teacher. In November 1916 he was drafted into the German army, serving until being seriously wounded on the first day of the Battle of Flanders ( July 31, 1917). Starting out as a teacher, salesman, and accountant after the war, he only began to get a hold on life when employed as a journalist and editor. In the early 1920s he changed “Paul” to “Maria,” Rilke’s—as well as his mother’s—second Christian name, and adopted the original spelling of the family name. It was in Berlin, the seething metropolis he had moved to in 1925, that he put down his look back to the years of fighting in the form of a novel. All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929 by Ullstein, was an instant success in Germany and abroad. Although he wrote 13 novels, most of them bestsellers and many, like this first great success, popularized as a film version, it is for the scathing attack on the evils of war and, in the character Himmelstoss, of the evils of German militarism, that Remarque is most famous. Though he left Germany in 1931, in 1933 for good to live in Switzerland and, from 1939 to live mostly in the

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United States until returning to Switzerland after 1945, many of his novels mirror life in decisive periods of twentieth-century German history: the experience of two wars, the Weimar years, flight from Nazism and exile, existence in a Nazi concentration camp.

Since Remarque was fascinated by a wide range of subjects, including music, literature, and the arts as well as by sports, fast cars, good food, and drink, he was a voracious reader throughout his life. Having already developed a love for literature in his youth, he was well versed in the works of Knut Hamsun, Jack London, Gottfried Keller, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, Edgar Allan Poe, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Franz Werfel, the works of

Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Hermann Hesse.

After the war experience he was even more strongly attracted to the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu had a profound impact on him, as did Franz Kafka’s unveiling of the automatism of evil. With Ernest Hemingway, whom he admired, he shared the feeling of belonging to a lost generation. At the time of writing All Quiet on the Western Front, the Great War had become the subject of many fictional and nonfictional publications, some of which Remarque reviewed, Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern and Franz Schauwecker’s Ringen an der Somme among them.

A childhood spent in relative poverty and the war experience may account for the epicurean lifestyle he adopted sometime in the twenties, later to be explained by a parable by Friedrich Rückert, Es ging ein Mann im Syrerland, in an interview on his sixty-fifth birthday. It encapsulated his motto for life: to live every day as if it were the last (quoted in Habe 1963, 64). Erich Maria Remarque, whose German citizenship had been revoked by the National Socialists in 1938 and who had become an American citizen in 1947, was married three times, twice to Jutta Ilse Zambona and, in 1958, to Paulette Goddard. He died in 1970 of a heart attack.

Archives

Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv Osnabrück.

Erich Maria Remarque-Archiv/Forschungsstelle Krieg und Literatur, Universität Osnabrück. Remarque Collection, Fales Library, New York University, New York (holder of diaries).

Printed Sources

Habe, Hans. “Umstellt, umlagert, umdroht,” Epoca (August 1963), 63–67.

Owen, Claude R. Erich Maria Remarque: A critical bio-bibliography (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984).

Remarque, Erich Maria. Das unbekannte Werk. Frühe Prosa, Werke aus dem Nachlaß, Briefe und Tagebücher, Thomas F. Schneider, Tilman Westphalen (eds.), vol. 5: Briefe und Tagebücher (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998).

Sternburg, Wilhelm von. “Als wäre alles das letzte Mal”: Erich Maria Remarque, eine Biographie

(Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998).

Taylor, Harley U. Jr. Erich Maria Remarque. A Literary and Film Biography (New York, Bern, Frankfurt/Main, Paris: Peter Lang, 1988).

Angela Schwarz

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Richler, Mordecai

RICHLER, MORDECAI (1931–2001)

Mordecai Richler was born in Montreal, Canada. He studied at Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University) in Montreal (1949–51). In 1951 Richler tired of college life and left Canada for Europe, spending almost two years in England, Spain, and France (in Paris he was part of an expatriate circle that included James Baldwin, Mavis Gallant, and Allen Ginsberg) before returning to Canada in 1952. In 1954, Richler again traveled to London, where he spent 18 years building an international literary reputation and establishing himself as one of Canada’s most important contemporary novelists. Upon his return to Canada in 1972, Richler became a vocal opponent of Canadian cultural nationalism, criticizing both national institutions (such the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where he worked in the 1950s) and a number of prominent Canadian writers. Although Richler produced fiction with less regularity in his later career, he continued to write for magazines and journals on both sides of the Atlantic, producing more than 300 articles on cultural and political topics by the end of his life. In the 1990s he generated considerable controversy with his loud criticism of Quebec nationalism. Richler’s 10 novels are among the most acclaimed works of Canadian fiction, and he is among the most honored of Canadian writers, having won two Governor General’s Awards, the Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and having been appointed to the Order of Canada.

All accounts of Richler’s life note the formative influence of his early religious training: he grew up in an insular, predominantly Jewish part of Montreal and attended parochial school with the expectation of becoming a rabbi. Later, Richler’s novels would critique and satirize Jewish Montreal, and a number of his nov- els—most notably The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)—have been called anti-Semitic. Richler’s early works are somewhat similar in style to those of some of his Paris acquaintances, notably Baldwin and Gallant, although Richler himself reveals that his most significant influences were the earlier generation of American modernists, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner (Cohen 1957, 34). The “cynical world-weariness” that characterizes much of Richler’s fiction can be traced back to his interest in existentialism and the works of French writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux (Brown 1983, 704). Within the Canadian tradition, Richler has compared himself to those writers whose works have a cosmopolitan inclination: Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies, Morley Callaghan, Malcolm Lowry, and Brian Moore (McSweeney 1985, 134–35). While Richler’s brand of satire continues in the Canadian tradition established by Stephen Leacock, it is more Juvenalian, recalling both the work of two of his Paris friends from the 1950s, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, and works of black humor by Nathanael West, Evelyn Waugh, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, all of whom Richler has acknowledged as influences (McSweeney 1985, 137).

Archives

University of Calgary Library, Special Collections, Mordecai Richler Fonds: correspondence, manuscripts of novels, short fiction, articles, screenplays, radio, television, and dramatic plays, interviews, other materials.

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Printed Sources

Brown, Russell. “Mordecai Richler.” In William Toye (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Cohen, Nathan. “A Conversation with Mordecai Richler,” The Tamarack Review 2 (Winter 1957), 6–23.

McSweeney, Kerry. “Mordecai Richler.” In Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley (eds.), Canadian Writers and Their Works. Fiction Series, vol. 6 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1985). Includes a detailed summary of influences on Richler’s fiction.

Ramraj, Victor. “Biocritical Essay.” In Apollonia Steele and Jean F. Tener (eds.), The Mordecai Richler Papers: First Accession (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, ca. 1987).

Shwartz, Ronald B. For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most

(New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1999).

Colin Hill

RIEFENSTAHL, HELENE (1902–2003)

Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl was born in Berlin, where she studied music and art history at the State School of Arts and Crafts. In 1919 she entered the Lohmann School in Thale, where she began acting in and directing stage plays. She was confirmed in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. Riefenstahl was a rising star as an actress in German cinema of the 1920s before becoming a film director of “bergfilms,” a film genre with mountain settings. She so impressed Adolf Hitler that he put her in charge of filming the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg and the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The two films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, are considered landmark documentaries because of Riefenstahl’s innovative camera work, editing, and powerful combination of images and music. While she has always insisted that her art was entirely separate from politics, her critics accuse her of being a willing propagandist for the Nazis. But regardless of what Riefenstahl’s personal motivations may have been in the 1930s, her Triumph of the Will glorified the Nazi Party and was a driving force in unifying Hitler’s political power in Germany. Later in her career she continued to innovate with her work in underwater and anthropological still photography.

Riefenstahl maintained that she remained politically naive well into early adulthood. “My favorite pastime was reading fairy-tales and this taste lasted well beyond childhood,” Riefenstahl wrote in her autobiography (Riefenstahl 1992, 4). At 15 she was still buying the weekly magazine Fairy-Tale World. She would lock herself in her room and “read and re-read, over and over again” stories such as “The Girl with the Three Walnuts,” which she “has never forgotten” (Riefenstahl 1992, 4). Her other youthful passion was drama, and while in boarding school she was moved by such German classics as Friedrich von Schiller’s The Brigand, Gotthold Lessing’s Minna Von Barnhelm, and Johann Goethe’s Faust. She received the works of Friedrich Holderlin and Friedrich Nietzsche from an admirer while in her early twenties (Riefenstahl 1992, 47) and indicates in her autobiography that she read Thus Spake Zarathustra and especially admired Nietzsche’s poetry and use of language (Riefenstahl 1992, 130). She has stated that she first read Mein Kampf in 1932, shortly before her first meeting with Adolf Hitler. “I had jotted such comments in the margins as ‘Untrue, Wrong, Mistaken,’ though sometimes I put ‘Good,’” she recalled in her autobiography (Riefenstahl 1992, 125). A different account describes a more enthusiastic response to Mein Kampf. “She came over to

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my apartment one day holding the book high above her head and said . . . ‘you must sit down and read this man’s book through. I must meet him!’ Up until that day she was as much interested in and knew probably less about politics than my housemaid” (Sokal 1976, 14). While Riefenstahl defends Triumph of the Will as merely a documentary of an historical event, critics argue that it employs the subtle propaganda techniques outlined in Mein Kampf. Riefenstahl’s loudest critics see fascist ideology at the root of her focus on physical perfection and natural beauty. But more cogent analyses of her work consider the literary and artistic tradition Riefenstahl was heir to. One must understand that the adoration of perfect bodies and beautiful nature was a romantic principle subjugated by Nazi ideology. As Von Dassanowski observes: “Essentially a Bergfilm maker and a nature-mystic, Riefenstahl gave Hitler’s set pieces the needed emotional association with German tradition and culture. The concept of the nature-bound outsider as prophet, so prevalent in Riefenstahl’s work, is also to be found throughout the German Romantic literary canon, in the works of Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], [Ludwig] Tieck, Goethe, [Joseph] von Eichendorff, and Holderlin, where it is anything but reactionary or authoritarian” (Von Dassanowski 1995/96, 1). Riefenstahl’s decision late in life to photograph in Africa was inspired by her reading of The Green Hills of Africa. “I read until dawn,” she recalls, “by which time Hemingway’s lifelong fascination with Africa had taken hold of me” (Riefenstahl 1992, 407). Riefenstahl’s unrealized project is a film production of Heinrich von Kleist’s play about the queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea. She said reading it in 1926 was an unforgettable, intense experience. “I feel myself so akin to [Kleist] that . . . everything is spoken from the depths of my soul. In Penthesilia I found my own individuality as in no other character” (Riefenstahl 1973, 194).

Archives

Riefenstahl file, Berlin Document Center: Third Reich records including official documents and correspondence between Riefenstahl and party officials.

Archives of the Federal Republic of Germany, Koblenz: Third Reich records including official documents and correspondence between Riefenstahl and party officials.

Printed Sources

Berg-Pan, Renata. Leni Riefenstahl (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980).

Dassanowsky, Robert von. “Wherever You May Run, You Cannot Escape Him: Leni Riefenstahl’s Self-Reflection and Romantic Transcendence of Nazism in Tiefland,” Camera Obscura 35 (1996), 107–30.

Riefenstahl, Leni. Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

———. “Why I Am Filming Penthesilea,” Film Culture 56 (Spring 1973), 192–215. Sokal, Harry R. “Uber Nacht antisemitin geworden?” Der Spiegel 30, 46 (1976), 14.

Richard N. Swanson

RIVERA, DIEGO (1886–1957)

José Diego Rivera Barrientos was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, and moved with his family to Mexico City at the age of six. He was enrolled in the San Carlos Academy (1896) and the National School of Fine Arts (1898), where he studied under noted engraver José Guadalupe Posada until the time of his expulsion in 1906. The following year, Rivera earned a four-year Veracruz scholarship for European study

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and traveled to Spain and Paris, where he became influenced by cubism, postimpressionism, and Renaissance painting, exhibiting at the 1911 Salon d’Automne as well as with Pablo Picasso at numerous cubist exhibitions. Upon returning to his homeland in 1921, Rivera was commissioned to decorate the convent of St. Peter and St. Paul in Mexico City with a mural program. The artist traveled to the ancient Mexican sites of Chichen Itza and Uxmal before embarking on the production of the first of literally hundreds of murals that would celebrate Mexican culture and heritage. In 1923 Rivera formed the Mexican Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors and the Escuela Mexicana de Pintura with fellow muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. In 1929 he was appointed director of the Academy of San Carlos, and during the next two decades continued to accept numerous commissions, producing series of murals for the National Palace in Mexico City (1930–35), the Detroit Art Institute and Rockefeller Center (1932), and the Mexican Hotel del Prado (1948). Rivera died of heart failure in his San Angel Studio and is buried at the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres in Mexico City.

Rivera’s artistic promotion of a traditional and independent Mexican culture was influenced by the wave of social realist writers who dominated Mexican literature during the early part of the twentieth century. South American authors such as Mariano Picon Salas, German Arciniegas, and Mexican Minister of Education José Vasconcelos detailed the injustices imposed upon the Mexican working classes in their novellas and essays. Novels such as The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela and Martin Luiz Guzman’s The Eagle and the Serpent cast the Mexican indigenous population and the poor as the protagonists of their stories and dealt with contemporary social ills and issues of social reform as subject matter. As well, Mexican regionalism and history was popularized by such authors as Horatio Quiroga and Eduardo Acevedo Diaz, who wrote the gaucho novels that Rivera read as a youth. As a Marxist Leninist and a member of the Mexican Communist Party (1923–30 and again from 1954 until the time of his death), Rivera’s style and subject matter were often influenced by his left-wing, anti-Stalinist views. Rivera analyzed the writings of Vladimir Lenin and exiled Russian Revolution leader Leon Trotsky and expressed his own ideology in various literary submissions to the New York magazine The Partisan Review. After his exposure to cubism and modern art during his European sojourn, Rivera studied the work of surrealist founder André Breton, and the two men collaborated in preparing a manifesto entitled Towards a Free Revolutionary Art. In this work Diego espoused his notion that the major function of modern art should be to aid in the revolution of the working class against oppression, in whatever form it may take.

Archives

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., control no. DCAW220208-A.

Printed Sources

Marnham, Patrick. Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Knopf, 1998).

Rivera, Diego, and Gladys March. My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Dover Press, 1991).

Wolfe, Bertram D. The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000).

Gregory L. Schnurr

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Robeson, Paul Leroy Bustill

ROBESON, PAUL LEROY BUSTILL (1898–1976)

Paul Robeson—actor, singer, orator, athlete, and civil rights activist—was born in Princeton, New Jersey, to clergyman William Drew Robeson, a former escaped slave of Nigerian Ibo origin, and Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, a descendant of African Bantus, Delaware Indians, and American Quakers. Robeson challenged discrimination early in life. He was the third African American to officially attend Rutgers College and graduated as valedictorian with numerous honors in 1919. He was the first Rutgers player to earn a place on Walter Camp’s All-American football team in 1917–18, and he began to play professional football in 1920. After earning a law degree from Columbia University in 1923, Robeson left the profession to pursue a theatrical career and gained early experience with the experimental Provincetown Players. Robeson is noted for his many performances of The Emperor Jones and Show Boat, from which came one of his most beloved songs, “Ol’ Man River.” He also distinguished himself in feature films. A popular concert singer, Robeson and collaborator Lawrence Brown (1893–1972) began to include African American spirituals in their concert program in 1925, stressing the history and culture of African Americans to diverse audiences.

Robeson’s career became overtly political in the 1930s. He performed with the Unity Theater and helped found the Council on African Affairs in 1937 and the Negro Playwrights Company in 1940, the same year he released the patriotic Ballad for Americans. In 1942 he abandoned film-acting to protest stereotypical casting and in 1944 performed the title role in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s Othello that broke racial barriers in casting. He received numerous awards, including a citation from the Secretary of the Treasury for “patriotic service” (1942), the Abraham Lincoln Medal (1943), the American Academy of Arts and Letters medal (1944), and the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal (1945). But Robeson’s criticism of American racism and his support of Soviet Marxism drew the investigation of the U.S. House UnAmerican Activities Committee and in 1950 the State Department revoked his passport, the same year he shared the International Peace Prize with Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). In 1952 Robeson was awarded the International Stalin Peace Prize. His passport was reinstated following a 1958 Supreme Court decision, and he returned to the international stage and the recognition of a new generation of civil rights activists. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995.

In 1944 Robeson said “I consider art a social weapon,” and his literary influences reflect his desire to combine art and politics (Duberman 1989, 273). His traditional education included rigorous study of the Bible, Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare. His legal training influenced his position on civil rights, and he frequently cited the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Literature of the African American historical and cultural experience inspired Robeson throughout his life. In his autobiography in Here I Stand (1958), Robeson often referred to Black writers and activists Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), Frederick Douglass (ca. 1817–95) and W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1963). Robeson’s experience collaborating with and reading the works of prominent African American writers such as Richard Wright (1908–60) and reading publications that focused on race relations, including the NAACP’s The Crisis (1910– ), further contributed to his emphasis on African American culture and racial equality.

In the 1930s Robeson’s interest in Marxism drew him toward works such as

Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935) by Sidney (1858–1947) and Beatrice

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