Dictionary of Literary Influences

Robinson, Jack Roosevelt

(1858–1943) Webb. He frequently read and contributed to leftist journals such as Freedom (1950–55). Finally, Robeson’s dedication to learning about his own heritage led him to study African and other languages as well as philology. He combined this with sustained examination of international folk songs and scholarly literature on the folk tradition in order to develop his thesis that such songs revealed the unified struggles of oppressed people everywhere. His concert repertoire of spirituals, international folk songs, and works like William Blake’s The Little Black Boy reflect Robeson’s wide-ranging literary background.

Archives

Robeson Family Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Wash-

ington, D.C.

The Paul Robeson Collection (microform). Bethesda, Md.: University Publications of America,

1991.

Printed Sources

Boyle, Sheila Tully, and Andrew Bunie. Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement

(Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

Duberman, Martin Bauml. Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989). Foner, Philip S. (ed.). Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918–1974 (New

York: Citadel Press, 1978).

Robeson, Eslanda Goode. Paul Robeson, Negro (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1930). Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand (New York: Othello Associates, 1958).

Robeson, Paul Jr. The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey, 1898–1939 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2001).

Seton, Marie. Paul Robeson (London: Dobson Books, Ltd., 1958).

Jill Silos

ROBINSON, JACK ROOSEVELT (1919–1972)

Jackie Robinson was born near Cairo, Georgia. Mallie Robinson named her youngest child for former president Theodore Roosevelt who spoke out against peonage, or new slavery, in the rural South. It was also Mallie who moved her family of five children to Pasadena, California, in 1920. Growing up on Pepper Street in Pasadena, Robinson watched his mother build a life for her family at a time when Jim Crow laws permeated all aspects of American life. From his mother, Robinson learned about faith and God, lessons and practice that would both challenge and sustain him throughout the rest of his life and in particular during the early years of his baseball career. The young Robinson distinguished himself immediately on the playing fields in Pasadena and at UCLA. An early influence included the Reverend Karl Everette Downs, pastor of Mallie’s Scott United Methodist Church, who brought the teenaged Robinson back to Christ, encouraged him to teach Sunday school, and reminded him that he had a responsibility to help people that went beyond sports. Following time in the U.S. Army, Robinson began his professional baseball career with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues. In August 1945 he met with Branch Rickey, president of the Los Angeles Dodgers, agreeing to become the first African American player in the Major Leagues. At that meeting, Rickey handed Robinson a copy of Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ. Rickey opened the book to the passage concerning turning the other cheek, exactly what Robinson would be asked to do as the first Black ballplayer in the major leagues. Writer

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Roger Kahn knew Robinson during his playing days with the Dodgers and notes that though Robinson was bright, he was not bookish, enjoying the racetrack and cards, reading newspapers and Life magazine. In his seasons with the Dodgers, Robinson was honored with Rookie of the Year and National League Most Valued Player honors while helping the Dodgers to six pennants. In those years he also nurtured friendships with Edward R. Murrow and Ed Sullivan, bridge master Charles Goren, and writers Roger Kahn and Milton Gross. Though he read few books, it appears Robinson’s passion for words come through in the letters and essays he began to write about social justice and civil rights. Robinson contributed the essay “Free Minds and Hearts at Work” to Murrow’s 1952 volume This I Believe: The Living Philosophies of One Hundred Thoughtful Men and Women in All Walks of Life. In the years following baseball, Robinson used the recognition from his playing days to bridge the civil rights movement and mainstream society. One of his primary causes included lobbying for Black managers in baseball.

After baseball, Robinson found ways to position himself to strike a balance between sports and civil rights. His years at UCLA had given him an intellectual framework, and after baseball, Robinson began having regular conversations with Columbia University professor Franklin Williams, who was also the secretarycounsel of the West Coast branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Through those conversations and his own experience growing up in Jim Crow Pasadena and breaking baseball’s color barrier, Robinson expanded his role as a voice for civil rights. Visible as a businessman and through various chairmanships for the NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Robinson also put many of his thoughts on paper. Not necessarily an avid reader, Robinson was a prolific writer, starting a magazine directed primarily at Blacks called Our Sports. Writers for the magazine included Robinson himself, as well as Roger Kahn and Joe Louis. In his tri-weekly sports column for the New York Post, Robinson wrote about events on the international stage in Cuba, Africa, Tibet, and Israel, as well as local domestic issues such as housing discrimination in New York, juvenile delinquency, and migrant workers, and about personalities such as Harry Belafonte, Howard Cosell, and Sidney Poitier. The young playwright William Branch was his ghostwriter. In his column, titled at various times “Jackie Robinson Says” and “Home Plate,” for the New York Black weekly, Amsterdam News, Robinson and ghostwriter Alfred Duckett addressed politics and civil rights. Robinson’s columns were aggressive and controversial, usually bringing in loads of reader mail to both the Post and the Amsterdam News. In his youth, Robinson found his outlet in sports. As an adult, Robinson found in sports a bridge to other causes. Putting his own voice alongside the voices of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and having public arguments on the pages of the Amsterdam News with Malcolm X, Robinson continued to challenge barriers and bring issues to the forefront of American consciousness.

Archives

Arthur Mann Papers, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; Branch Rickey Papers, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; Jackie Robinson Papers, Jackie Robinson Foundation, New York; Major League Baseball archives, New York; National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (civil rights advocacy letters); National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; Negro League Collection, National Baseball Library, Cooperstown,

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New York; Our Sports archives, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; Player Clipping Files, National Baseball Library, Cooperstown, New York.

Printed Sources

Rampersad, Arnold. Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Robinson, Jackie, and Alfred Duckett. I Never Had It Made (New York: Fawcett, Crest,

1974).

Tygiel, Jules. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

——— (ed.). The Jackie Robinson Reader: Perspectives on an American Hero (New York: Dutton, 1997).

Devon Niebling

ROCKEFELLER, JOHN DAVISON SR. (1839–1937)

John D. Rockefeller was born in Richford, New York. He quit high school two months before graduation in 1855 and completed a three-month business college course in Cleveland. In 1857 he entered his first business partnership and in 1863 invested in the burgeoning petroleum industry. He married Laura Celestia “Cettie” Spelman in 1864; they had four daughters and one son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., his father’s successor at the Standard Oil Company and the primary heir to the Rockefeller fortune. By 1865 Rockefeller Sr. was a partner in two oil refineries, and in 1870 he organized Standard Oil, of which he remained president until 1896. Key to Standard Oil’s early success was Rockefeller’s discovery that collusion with railroads and pipeline companies enabled him to form an airtight trust that eliminated competition. One of the first major trusts in the United States, Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of U.S.-refined oil by 1877 and for years encountered opposition to its aggressive business practices before being dissolved by the Supreme Court in 1911. The enormous wealth that Rockefeller accumulated through business enabled his generous philanthropy; he donated millions of private dollars to charities and helped to found such enduring institutions as the University of Chicago, Spelman College, Rockefeller University, and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1939 Rockefeller died at his country home in Ormond Beach, Florida, at the age of 97.

In boyhood and adolescence, Rockefeller was a serious student interested primarily in principles of mathematics and investment and in current events and social issues. He attended small schools and is known to have studied from a book of compositions entitled Parker’s Aids; he is likely also to have read Cobb’s Spelling Book or the English Reader and various history and travel books. A more specific record of his literary influences does not exist, for Rockefeller himself “could not recall” having “read widely” in his youth (Nevins 1940, 46) and throughout his lifetime was not interested in music, art, literature, or philosophy. Rockefeller did read the Bible, Baptist periodicals, and the newspaper, all of which had a more lasting influence on him than did most of his schoolbooks. At church he formed lifelong habits of altruism and temperance as well as the belief that his ability to make money was a gift from God. While literature did not directly influence him, Rockefeller certainly captured the late-nineteenth-century American literary imagination and embodied the expansionist spirit of an era that Mark Twain named “The Gilded Age.” To some Rockefeller exemplified author Horatio Alger Jr.’s vision of the

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independent, brave, and ambitious American hero (Chernow 1998, 48), and to others, as represented by Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth against Commonwealth (1894) and Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), Rockefeller was the symbol of the corruption and ruthlessness of the American capitalistic enterprise. The figure of “the American millionaire,” inspired by the likes of Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and J. Pierpont Morgan, and the unstoppable forces of capitalism and social Darwinism are also featured in such fiction as Henry James’s The American (1877), William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901).

Archives

The Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.: exhaustive collection; 30,000 cubic feet of documents; records of family-founded philanthropic and educational institutions; 500,000 photographs; 2,000 films.

Printed Sources

Chernow, Ron. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998). Nevins, Allan. John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, 2 vols. (New York:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940).

———. Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953).

Tiffany Aldrich

ROCKWELL, NORMAN (1894–1978)

Norman Rockwell was born in New York City and began studies at the New York School of Art in 1908. He pursued further studies at the National Academy of Design in 1910, and later at the Art Students League founded by noted American illustrator Howard Pyle. Rockwell’s gift for figurative painting and illustration was recognized and nurtured by the academic George Bridgeman, who encouraged the young artist to utilize a traditional rather than a modernist approach in his work. Upon graduation, Rockwell accepted a position as art director for Boy’s Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. In 1915 he moved to New Rochelle and began work as a freelance illustrator for such magazines as Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Country Gentleman. The following year he produced the first of over 300 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, garnering the attention and admiration of the magazine’s publisher, George Lorimer. During the First World War, Rockwell had a short career painting insignia on warplanes and producing officer portraits at Queenstown, Ireland, before receiving an inaptitude discharge. He returned home to continue work for the Saturday Evening Post and to produce various advertising campaigns for companies such as Jell-O and Orange Crush. During the Second World War, Rockwell painted The Four Freedoms, four large panels based on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address that were used to encourage war bond sales. In 1947 Rockwell helped found the Famous Artists School in Westport, Connecticut, and for the next several decades was commissioned to produce the official portraits of such presidents as Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon. In 1977 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford.

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The anti-intellectual style of Rockwell’s art and his choice of nostalgic subject matter reflect to a large extent the artist’s rather conventional literary influences. As a child, Rockwell was read the stories of Charles Dickens by his father and learned caricature drawing by imaginatively sketching figures such as Mr. Micawber from that author’s David Copperfield. The young artist also read Horatio Alger’s The River Boys, From Canal Boy to President, and Phil, the Fiddler, and began to produce illustrations to accompany these works in a style that reflected the regional settings of the novels. Rockwell was also an avid reader of Thomas Hardy and Mark Twain and would professionally illustrate the latter’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer while at the pinnacle of his career. The Rockwells were socially acquainted with many writers of their era, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an author and editor of the Book of the Month Club. Fisher lived next to the Rockwell residence in Vermont during the 1940s and regularly supplied the couple with new pieces of literature to peruse. Rockwell was known to have a penchant for the work of American authors, such as Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and that of American historians, such as Woodrow Wilson’s comprehensive A History of the American People. Despite his interest in home-grown literature, Rockwell also enjoyed the work of the author Edgar Allan Poe, especially his Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

Archives

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., control no. DCAW209851-A.

University of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections Department, Iowa City, control no. IAUG92-A1613.

George Arents Research Library for Special Collections at Syracuse University, Manuscript Collections, Syracuse, N.Y., NXSV653-A.

Printed Sources

Rockwell, Norman. My Adventures as an Illustrator (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988). Watson, Donald. A Rockwell Portrait: An Intimate Biography (Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews

and McMeel Inc., 1978).

Gregory L. Schnurr

ROGERS, WILLIAM PENN ADAIR (1879–1935)

Will Rogers was born on the 60,000-acre ranch of his father, Clem Vann Rogers, one-eighth Cherokee, and his wife, Mary America, one-quarter Cherokee, between the Verdigris and Caney Rivers in Indian Territory, later the state of Oklahoma. When he was six his father sent him to Drumgoole School, a one-room log cabin, but he hated to be indoors and soon proved to be a terrible student. Next his father briefly tried him at Harrell International Institute in Muskogee and at Tahlequah Male Seminary, but Will did not succeed at either. Seeking more discipline for his boy, Clem enrolled him at Willie Halsell College in Vinita, where Will lasted four years. He was happier there and won a medal for declamation, but he was still not a good student. He was expelled after one term at Scarritt Collegiate Institute in Neosho, Missouri, because he refused to study, still preferred the outdoors, and spent every possible minute practicing rope tricks. He later claimed that after spending three years with William Holmes McGuffey’s Fourth Reader he knew it

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better than McGuffey did. Annoyed and desperate, Clem sent Will to Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri, in 1896. Will learned Azel Storrs Lyman’s Historical Chart and consistently scored near 100 percent in American history but was mediocre in most other subjects. His verbal skills were considerable, his memory was powerful, but his mathematical and quantitative abilities were limited.

After two years at Kemper, which seemed to him like “one in the guardhouse and one in the fourth grade,” he dropped out of school at 18 and worked on W. P. Ewing’s ranch in Higgins, Texas. He toured the nation and the world with several Wild West shows, doing rope tricks, and by 1904 he was a headliner. Gradually he moved toward vaudeville and, between his tricks, began talking to his audience, mostly about current events, soon acquiring his reputation as a gentle but insightful critic of contemporary politics and culture, “The Cowboy Philosopher.” He summed up his life’s reading in 1931: “I am fifty-two years old, sound of body, but weak of mind, and I never did read hardly any books. . . . But I do a lot of newspaper reading. . . . If they would just quit printing newspapers for about a year, I could get some books read . . . All educated people started in reading good books. Well I didn’t. I seem to have gone from Frank Merriwell and Nick Carter . . . right to the Congressional Record, just one set of low fiction to another” (Ketchum 1973, 312-13).

Archives

Will Rogers Memorial Commission, Museum and Library, Claremore, Oklahoma.

Printed Sources

Alworth, E. Paul. Will Rogers (New York: Twayne, 1974).

Carter, Joseph H. Never Met a Man I Didn’t Like: The Life and Writings of Will Rogers (New York: Avon, 1991).

Day, Donald. Will Rogers: A Biography (New York: McKay, 1962).

Hitch, Arthur Martin. Will Rogers, Cadet: A Record of His Two Years as a Cadet at the Kemper Military School, Boonville, Missouri, Compiled from Letters from His Fellow Cadets and Interviews with Them and from School Records (Boonville, Mo.: Kemper Military School, 1935).

Ketchum, Richard M. Will Rogers: His Life and Times (New York: American Heritage, 1973). Milsten, David Randolph. Will Rogers: The Cherokee Kid (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Coman, 1993). Robinson, Ray. American Original: A Life of Will Rogers (New York: Oxford University Press,

1996).

Rogers, Betty Blake. Will Rogers: The Story of His Life Told by His Wife (Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing, 1943).

Rogers, Will. The Autobiography of Will Rogers (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 1998).

Yagoda, Ben. Will Rogers: A Biography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).

Eric v.d. Luft

ROOSEVELT, ANNA ELEANOR (1884–1962)

Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City to an affluent yet troubled family. When Eleanor was 15 her grandmother, who was raising her at the time, enrolled her in a private boarding school in England named Allenswood. In 1905, she married Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her cousin. A shy, diffident woman, Eleanor blossomed into one of the most influential women of the twentieth century, who championed minority causes, wrote the Universal Declaration of

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Human Rights, promoted liberal social policies on behalf of the Democratic Party, worked to further women’s rights, and served for 12 years as first lady to the thirty-second president.

It is difficult to pinpoint specific literary influences in Roosevelt’s life; however, when she was a young girl, books quelled her feelings of loneliness and alienation in a troubled family. Her mother was distant and uncaring; she labeled her daughter “Granny” (an epithet that shamed Eleanor greatly) because she considered her homely. In contrast, Eleanor’s father doted on her; however, as an alcoholic, he behaved unreliably and erratically. He often called her “Little Nell,” alluding to Charles Dickens’s character described in The Old Curiosity Shop as “a child of beautiful purity and character.” Tragedy hit the family early; by her tenth birthday, both of her parents and one brother had died. Consequently, Eleanor’s maternal grandmother raised her, though from a sense of duty to the family more than love for the little girl. In The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor recalls finding solace in the library, among Dickens, Scott, and Thackeray because she was “much alone” (Roosevelt 1961, 15). She also remembers that her grandmother would restrict her reading on Sundays to religious verses and hymns because Eleanor was required to teach Sunday school to the servants’ children. On weekdays, she was allowed to read liberally in the family library; however, when she “asked difficult questions” about certain books, they would somehow disappear. She adds, “I remember this happened to Dickens’ Bleak House. I spent days hunting for it” (Roosevelt 1961, 16).

During her schooling at Allenswood, Roosevelt also notes a love of books. In her autobiography, she recalls enthusiastically reading Dante and Shakespeare in a rigorous curriculum that also included French, German, Latin, history, music, and gym. Roosevelt flourished at Allenswood because the school matron, Marie Souvestre, adopted Eleanor and provided the love and guidance she so desperately sought. Daughter of the radical French philosopher Emil Souvestre, the schoolmistress passionately embraced causes of the dispossessed, such as Dreyfus in France and the Boers in South Africa. She also traveled throughout Europe with Roosevelt, emphasizing the need to “acquire languages,” as Roosevelt writes, “because of the enjoyment you missed in a country when you were deaf and dumb” (Roosevelt 1961, 31). In the first volume of her autobiography, Roosevelt called the years at Allenswood “the happiest” of her life adding, “Whatever I have become since had its seeds in those three years of contact with a liberal mind and a strong personality” (Roosevelt 1961).

Roosevelt’s accomplishments are innumerable. She is probably most known for serving as her husband’s “legs and ears” when he was stricken with polio in 1921. Roosevelt traveled extensively for her husband and then reported to him, thus becoming a savvy, seasoned politician in her own right. Among her many causes were poverty-stricken coal miners in West Virginia, unemployed Black and white youth, as well as disenfranchised artists, writers, and musicians. Always an advocate for women, she led four important organizations: the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Trade Union League, the Women’s City Club, and the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee. By the late 1940s, she was popularly called “First Lady of the World” because of her appointment to the United Nations by President Harry S. Truman. Serving on the UN Human Rights Commission, she crafted the renowned Declaration of

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Human Rights, which the General Assembly enacted in 1948. Throughout her life, she was prolific: between 1933 and 1945, for example, she dictated 2,500 syndicated newspaper columns, wrote 299 magazine articles, and delivered more than 70 speeches a year (Ward 1999, 814). She also wrote several memoirs: This is My Story (1937), This I Remember (1949), On My Own (1959), and Autobiography

(1961).

Archives

Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.

Printed Sources

“Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.” In Notable American Women of the Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary, Barbara Sicherman and Carol H. Green (eds.), (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 595–601. Concise overview of Roosevelt’s life.

Black, Ruby. Eleanor Roosevelt: A Biography (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940). Hareven, Tamara. Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience (Chicago: Quadrangle Books,

1968).

Lash, Joseph. Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971).

———. Eleanor: The Years Alone (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972).

Roosevelt, Eleanor. The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Harper, 1961).

Ward, Geoffrey C. “Eleanor Roosevelt.” In John Garraty and Mark Carnes (gen. eds.), American National Biography, vol. 18 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Concise overview of Eleanor’s life.

Rosemary King

ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN DELANO (1882–1945)

Franklin Roosevelt was born at Hyde Park, New York, to James Roosevelt, a well-to-do country gentleman, and his second wife, Sara Delano. Both parents traced their American lineage back well before the Revolution, and Franklin accepted unquestioningly his father’s Episcopalian religion and Democratic political loyalties. In childhood Roosevelt traveled extensively with his parents in Europe, spending the summer of 1891 at a German school, and quickly acquired both the French and German languages. Initially educated by private governesses and tutors, in 1896 he entered the elite Groton School, graduating in 1900. Roosevelt attended Harvard College for four years, in 1903 obtaining a “gentleman’s C” in his bachelor’s degree, and half-heartedly took master’s courses for another year before spending three years at Columbia Law School. Eager to emulate the political success of President Theodore Roosevelt, his wife Eleanor’s uncle, in 1910 Roosevelt ran for the New York Senate, serving two terms. In 1913 President Woodrow Wilson appointed him assistant secretary of the navy, where he strongly supported American intervention in World War I, and in 1920 Roosevelt campaigned unsuccessfully as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. Shortly afterward poliomyelitis left him partially paralyzed. In 1928 Roosevelt became governor of New York State, serving two terms before winning an unprecedented four terms as president. Between 1933 and his death in April 1945, Roosevelt substantially reshaped the United States. His 1930s New Deal programs, intended to combat the Great Depression, established a broad array of national welfare and labor legis-

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lation and economic regulatory agencies. From 1940 on, Roosevelt transformed U.S. foreign policy, steering the country into World War II and facilitating postwar American participation in multilateral institutions designed to promote international peace and stability.

Roosevelt’s associates agreed that for information he relied on people rather than books (Freidel 1952, 32; Daniels 1955, 104). Even so, his wife recalled that he “always read a great deal, chiefly biography and history, but occasionally a detective story,” and “had an amazing ability to skim through any kind of book and get everything out of it” (Roosevelt 1949, 117). An often solitary childhood, and later the restrictions disability imposed, encouraged Roosevelt to resort to books and his impressive stamp collection. The cherished only child of his father’s second marriage, he received numerous beautifully produced American and European children’s books. At an early age his mother read him such classics as Little Men, Robinson Crusoe, and The Swiss Family Robinson. Roosevelt also ranged freely in his parents’ extensive library, favoring American military and naval history, science, and natural history, while knowing most standard British and American literary classics (Freidel 1952, 31–32). A solid but unexceptional Groton student, Roosevelt won the Latin Prize, a 40-volume set of Shakespeare. Roosevelt later appropriated his Groton headmaster’s annual Christmas practice of reading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol aloud to his assembled family.

Roosevelt’s absorption in extracurricular activities, as librarian of the Fly Club his junior year and editor of the Harvard Crimson and librarian of the Hasty Pudding Club his senior year, contributed to his undistinguished academic college record. At Harvard he also began to amass a notable personal library of naval history, supplemented constantly throughout his lifetime, especially on trips abroad, together with smaller collections on his native Hudson Valley, children’s books, and miniature books (Freidel 1952, 59–60; Ward 1985, 237). A maritime enthusiast who owned a small sailing boat, the teenaged Roosevelt received copies of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660–1773 and The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future (Harper 1994, 23–24). The antiGerman Mahan, with whom Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy corresponded, forcefully supported American naval expansion, arguing that past American security had rested upon the British fleet, but the United States should now assume independent great-power status and acquire naval bases and colonies, albeit in partnership with Britain. Roosevelt subsequently read admiringly Homer Lea’s Day of the Saxon (1913), which predicted a forthcoming death struggle between the Anglo-American Saxon and German Teutonic races (Harper 1994, 33; Freidel 1952, 232). Though extensive, Roosevelt’s reading was somewhat unadventurous, essentially representing the conventional mental furniture of the contemporary American upper-class gentleman and giving little indication of his subsequent atypical dedication to extensive social reform. His lifelong interest in naval history and strategic writings anticipated Roosevelt’s eventual support for American intervention in both world wars and activist United States international policies.

Archives

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York: repository for the Personal and Political Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, together with those of many family members and political and personal associates.

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Printed Sources

Daniels, Jonathan. “Franklin Roosevelt and Books.” In Jonathan Daniels, Arthur Bestor, and David C. Mearns, Three Presidents and Their Books (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955).

Freidel, Frank. Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952). Harper, John Lamberton. American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan,

and Dean G. Acheson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Roosevelt, Eleanor. This I Remember (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949).

Ward, Geoffrey. Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).

Priscilla Roberts

ROSSELLINI, ROBERTO (1906–1977)

Born in Rome, Italy, on May 8, 1906, film director Roberto Rossellini had a happy and uncommon childhood. Raised in a Catholic milieu but without faith, Rossellini was a bad student at the Collegio Nazareno in Rome. Rossellini shot some minor movies between 1936 and 1943, but did not adopt neo-realism until Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945), a feature film that was shot in the ruins of Rome before the end of World War II. Open City went unnoticed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946, but was acclaimed by an influential Parisian critic a few weeks later, sparking worldwide acclaim for the film. His next films would follow the same aesthetic trend: Paisan (1946) and Germania Anno Zero (1947). Rossellini adapted many books for his films, including Jean Cocteau’s La Voix humaine in Paris for L’Amore (1948), Stefan Zweig’s novel for the film Fear (1954), and Paul Claudel’s oratorio, Jeanne au bûcher (1955). From 1965, Rossellini chose humanity’s greatest men as his film subjects, using television instead of cinema in order to reach the masses. This biographical cycle is the last of his career: La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV (1966), Socrates (1970), Blaise Pascal (1972), Cartesius (on René Descartes, 1974), and Il Messiah (1975).

Roberto Rossellini’s father owned a fabric business, but he was also an intellectual who wrote books that Roberto reread many times through his life. Italian author Raul Maria De Angelis wrote in Cinema that Rossellini asked him in 1943 to show him how to write novels, not in James Joyce’s style, but rather in a Dos Passos fashion (Maria De Angelis 1990). In the postscript of Rossellini’s autobiography, Italian journalist Stefano Roncoroni mentions that the two main literary influences on Rossellini were probably De vita propria by Jérôme Cardan and Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Bellour 1990). But Rossellini didn’t talk much about what he read; he preferred to say that he only read biographies and books about science. In an essay about media and education published the year of his death, Rossellini repeatedly quoted Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville. In 1962, Rossellini defined himself as an Aristotelian. He also was interested in history and psychology. Roberto Rossellini didn’t like American movies, although he admired Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and, above all, films by D. W. Griffith and German director F. W. Murnau (1888–1931). He hated sports.

Archives

Cineteca Nazionale, Rome. Manuscripts, correspondence.

RAI, Rome. Films, correspondence.

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