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Dictionary of Literary Influences

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Arp, Jean

Meryman, Richard. Louis ArmstrongA Self Portrait (New York: The Eakins Press, 1966). Miller, Marc. H. (ed). Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy (New York: Queens Museum of Art, in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 1994).

Marianne Wilson

ARP, JEAN (1887–1966)

Jean Arp was born of mixed French and German descent in Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace-Lorraine. He was privately tutored in his youth and from 1905 to 1907 studied at the Strasbourg School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar School of Art. Upon graduation he was accepted into the Academie Julian in Paris but rejoined his family in Weggis, Switzerland, in 1910 to study and paint in relative seclusion. In 1911 he exhibited at the Moderne Bund along with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and the following year traveled to Munich where he met Vassily Kandinsky. Arp exhibited with the artists of der Blaue Reiter, as well as with the Expressionists at the First Autumn Salon in Berlin. Obtaining exemption from military service during the First World War, Arp completed his first true abstracts in the form of paper cut-outs, wood reliefs, and organic, biomorphic compositions of string on canvas. His experiments in whimsical abstraction led him to become a founding member of the dadaist movement that sprang from Hugo Ball’s organization of artists and philosophers in Zurich. Arp participated in the first Surrealist exhibition at the Gallery Pierre in 1925, but in the decade that followed directed his efforts toward more simplified freestanding sculpture. Following a period of seclusion during the Second World War, Arp traveled to the United States where he completed a wood relief for the Graduate Center at Harvard University. Up until the time of his death, Arp traveled and sculpted extensively, and was honored with a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1958. He was awarded the International Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale (1954) and was the recipient of the Grand Prix National des Arts (1963), the Carnegie Prize (1964), and the German Order of Merit (1965).

Arp loved to read and write poetry, and frequently studied Rene Schickele and Otto Flake of the Sturmer group as well as the German Romantic poet Clemens Brentano. Arp was fascinated by the grace and fantastical imagery of German folk tales such as Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which he copied for the sake of preservation. Arp believed that literature, like visual art, need not have deep meaning or cerebral intention to be effective in conveying beauty and harmony. The rationale behind Arp’s organic painting and sculpture was based partially on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s notion that all forms in nature are modifications of a few basic or primal forms. Along with this, Arp’s work was influenced by the precepts of Zen Buddhism and those espoused in the Chinese I Ching, which stated that chance was always meaningful at the unconscious level of the psyche. Arp would frequently incorporate the accidental into his work, by choosing words at random from newspapers to include in his paintings or letting the play of gravity determine the position of falling pieces of paper that he would assemble into his papiers dechires. In this way, his work was allied with that of the surrealist artists and poets such as Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon who valued the part played by the subconscious in artistic production.

Archives

Museum of Modern Art archives, New York, control no. NYMV90-A1.

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Asturias, Miguel Angel

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., control no. DCAW210187-A.

The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections, control no. CJPA1564998-A.

Printed Sources

Arp, Jean. On My Way: Poetry and Essays 1912–47 (New York: The Documents of Modern Art, 1948).

Jean, Marcel (ed.). Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories (New York: Viking Press, 1972). Read, Herbert. Arp (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968).

Gregory L. Schnurr

ASTURIAS, MIGUEL ANGEL (1899–1974)

Miguel Angel Asturias was born in La Parroquia, Guatemala, during the presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. His father, a supreme court judge and a Cabrera dissident, subjected his family to three years of self-imposed exile at a remote location in Baja Verapaz. In 1906 the family returned to Guatemala City and Miguel began attending catechism classes at a local Catholic school. He achieved his bachillerato at the state-controlled Instituto Nacional Central de Varones and proceeded to the university, where he studied first medicine, then law. While at the university, Asturias joined the radical Unionista party and wrote politically charged articles for the local student newspaper El Estudiante. Upon graduation Asturias traveled extensively throughout Europe, but returned to his native Guatemala in 1931 to teach literature. Under the reign of President Ubico, he was forcibly appointed to a seat in the Guatemalan National Assembly, which he held until the dictator’s deposition in 1944. In the decade that followed, Asturias served as ambassador and official diplomat to Mexico, Argentina, and El Salvador under the reformative presidency of Juan Jose Arevalo. Asturias began writing complex and didactic reformative novels in 1946 with El Señor Presidente, a work that won the International French Book Award in 1956. This was followed by a string of successful and highly acclaimed novels including Hombres de maiz (1949), El papa verde (1954), and Weekend in Guatemala (1956) within which the almost exclusively indigenous protagonists struggle against social, economic, and political oppression and the detrimental effects of modernization. Asturias won both the William Faulkner Foundation Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966 and became the first Latin American novelist to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967.

Due to his extensive travels and broad scope of concerns and interests, Asturias’s literary influences were extremely eclectic. From his time in France, Asturias became acquainted with the popular literature of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, but was fascinated with surrealist texts such as Robert Desnos’s Deuil pour deuil and La liberté ou l’amour. Asturias met with many surrealist authors, including Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, and André Breton, the latter of which had just published his Manifeste du Surrealism a few years prior to Asturias’s residency in Paris. Asturias experimented with these authors’ automatic writing techniques and employed their rhetorical devices as well as their use of the irrational and the incongruous in his novels. Asturias was also deeply influenced by the literary culture of his homeland. As a student of Georges Raynaud, he was extremely familiar with the indigenous texts of the Popul Vuh and the Annals of Xahil. Asturias incor-

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Attlee, Clement

porated their nonlinear narrative structure and use of complex symbolism into his paragrammatic novels such as Hombres de maiz, wherein the plot develops associatively as opposed to chronologically. Asturias read Jose Vasconcelos’s Prometeo Vencendor and also the works of the agrarian reform authors Carlos Pellicer and Jaime Torres Bodet, who espoused the fall of modernist dictatorships and a return to a pre-Columbian lifestyle for the indigenous populations of South America. Asturias was also an impassioned reader of the works of the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, whose theories of the collective unconsciousness and the shared experience of myth heavily influenced and verified the author’s use of parabolic epics and legends in his novels.

Archives

Manuscript collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Printed Sources

Callan, Richard J. Miguel Angel Asturias (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970).

Henigham, Stephen. Assuming the Light: The Parisian Literary Apprenticeship of Miguel Angel Asturias (London: University of Oxford, 1999).

Prieto, Rene. Miguel Angel Asturias’ Archaeolog y of Return (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Gregory L. Schnurr

ATTLEE, CLEMENT (1883–1967)

Clement Attlee, British politician and Labour prime minister, was born in Putney, outside London, in 1883, the youngest son of Henry and Ellen Attlee. His father was a solicitor in the City—a Gladstonian Liberal in politics in a family of Tories—who provided a solidly middle-class home for his family.

Initially educated by his mother at home, Attlee later followed his four older brothers to Haileybury College and the University of Oxford. He remembered his mother as “very well read” and that he “learned to read early and was a voracious reader,” being especially fond of poetry (Attlee 1955, 6). His subsequent years in a preparatory school were less fulfilling and he recalled “poor teachers and excessive stress on studying the Bible and biblical history” (Attlee 1955, 9). He continued to read, however, and often finished four books a week (Pearce 1997, 11). Subsequently, he enjoyed the study of history at Haileybury College, did well overall, and remained attached to the school in later years.

He left University College, Oxford, with a second in Modern History, and retained a lifelong interest in the subject. Surprisingly, his favorite author in later years was Sir Arthur Bryant, whose panegyrics to the English past appealed to Attlee’s own optimistic view of Britain in the world (Pearce 1997, 9). In this same vein, Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan were among the authors he read to his children. Even as prime minister, he once spent a weekend at Chequers reading Edward Gibbon, as well as finding time for Thomas Hardy, John Milton, “the more sonorous Elizabethans,” and Trevelyan’s Social History of England (Pearce 1997, 11, 104). Alternatively, he might relax to the pages of either Wisden—“always good for the settling of the mind”—or the entries of the Dictionary of National Biography (Pearce, 123).

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Attlee, Clement

Under the influence of his older brother, a Christian Socialist, Attlee became involved in the late Victorian social reform movement and, eventually, the developing socialist party. This stimulus led him not only to read the works of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris, but also to become directly involved in the settlement house programs being established in London’s East End. From 1907 to 1909, he served as manager of the Haileybury Club—sponsored by his old school—and was also secretary of the better-known Toynbee Hall. Eventually, his reading and practical experience led to an appointment teaching in the Social Sciences Department of the new London School of Economics, which had been established by Sidney Webb.

His personal experience working with the poor gave him a deep understanding of their living conditions but also convinced him that self-help would be insufficient to remedy their plight. Greater social and political changes would be necessary. In 1907, therefore, he joined the local branch of the Independent Labor Party (ILP). One influence in this direction was Beatrice Webb’s minority report to the 1909 Poor Law Commission, which called for socialist solutions to poverty. This report also led Attlee onto a more public stage as he became a spokesman for both Webb’s report and, in 1911, the National Insurance Act that David Lloyd George and the Liberal government were pushing through Parliament (Attlee, 38). During the First World War, Attlee served in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and northern France, rising to the rank of major. He returned to East London and quickly became a fixture in local politics as mayor of Stepney, alderman, and, after 1922, MP for Limehouse.

Despite membership in the ILP, Attlee was not a strict Marxist. Reflecting the views of Ruskin, among others, he recalled later: “The socialist movement in Great Britain began long before Karl Marx. It was derived from native thinkers. It has its economic basis, but still more its ethical basis. . . . a longing for social justice derived from Christian principles” (Brookshire 1995, 9, quoting a speech at the Commonwealth Club of California, May 2, 1945). This moderate political approach was essential to the task Attlee faced when he was called to lead the Labor Party after 1935. It kept the party united through the strains of the late 1930s and subsequently into the wartime coalition of Winston Churchill and, ultimately, to sweeping electoral victory in 1945. His moderation sometimes disappointed elements in his own party, but fit the mood of the country, particularly after the publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942. The program of social insurance—most notably a National Health Service—family allowances, and full employment provided the blueprint for postwar reform and reconstruction. It also fit easily within Attlee’s pragmatic mind and was quickly adopted by him and the Labour Party and proved to be the basis for the party’s 1945 campaign manifesto. In his postwar government, 1945–51, Attlee saw most of the plan put into action and in doing so both radically altered British society and set the framework for the late-twentieth- century political debate in Britain.

Archives

Bodleian Library, Oxford, U.K.

Churchill College, Cambridge, U.K.

Labour Party Archives, National Museum of Labour History, Manchester, U.K.

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Atwood, Margaret Eleanor

Printed Sources

Attlee, Clement. As It Happened (London: Heinemann, 1955).

Brookshire, Jerry H. Clement Attlee (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Harris, Kenneth. Attlee (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).

Pearce, Robert. Attlee (London: Longman, 1997).

Derek W. Blakeley

ATWOOD, MARGARET ELEANOR (1939– )

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada, and spent most of her childhood in Toronto. She studied at Victoria College, University of Toronto (1957–61), and received her M.A. from Radcliffe College, Harvard, where she studied from 1961 to 1962. She began a Ph.D. thesis on the Gothic romance at Harvard in 1965 but returned to Canada in 1967 after winning the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. During the 1970s, Atwood held posts at several Canadian universities and served as an editor of House of Anansi Press (1971–73), where she came into contact with the emerging generation of experimental Canadian writers that included Graeme Gibson, who would become her lifelong companion. She was a central figure in Canadian literary criticism for a time after the publication of Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), combining the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye with an unapologetic Canadian nationalism. In the 1970s Atwood became Canada’s preeminent poet and novelist and a major public figure, and in the 1980s and 90s she consolidated her international reputation. She has published more than three dozen books and been the recipient of numerous prestigious honors and awards, including the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, and more than a dozen honorary degrees.

Atwood’s literary influences reflect her wide reading of both Canadian and other Western literatures. In Survival, Atwood enumerates some of her childhood reading: American comic books, Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Canadian short fiction, including the works of Sir Charles G. D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton. The autobiographical writings of Susanna Moodie, an early nineteenth-century English immigrant to Canada, provide a creative point of departure for many of Atwood’s best-known works and are reflected in her imaginative and thematic interpretations of the Canadian landscape. Other Canadian influences on Atwood’s work are numerous, as her critics have revealed, and they include P. K. Page, Margaret Avison, Douglas LePan, Anne Hébert, Phyllis Webb, Gwendolyn MacEwen, bill bissett, John Newlove, Al Purdy, Jay Macpherson, Northrop Frye, D. G. Jones, James Reaney, Eli Mandel, and Dennis Lee (see Carrington 1987 and Mallinson 1985). Atwood’s poetic techniques reflect her reading of both contemporary Canadian poetry and the works of prominent modernist poets, including William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath (Mallinson 1985). Atwood’s fiction draws upon a wide variety of models including the novels of Jane Austen, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and William Golding, and a persistent satiric trend in her work reveals her indebtedness to Canadian satirists Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Stephen Leacock, and Robertson Davies (Carrington 1987). Atwood, in turn, became the most influential Canadian writer of her generation.

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Auden, Wystan Hugh

Archives

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, The Margaret Atwood Collection: drafts of Atwood’s published works, unpublished poems and fiction, unfinished Ph.D. thesis, correspondence, juvenilia, original artwork.

Printed Sources

Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Concord, Ont.: House of Anansi Press, 1972).

Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. “Margaret Atwood.” In Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley (eds.), Canadian Writers and Their Works, Fiction Series, Vol. 9 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1987). Includes a detailed summary of influences on Atwood’s fiction.

Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography (Toronto: ECW Press, 1998).

Mallinson, Jean. “Margaret Atwood.” In Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley (eds.), Canadian Writers and Their Works, Poetry Series, Vol. 9 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1985). Includes a detailed summary of influences on Atwood’s poetry.

Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998). A biography of Atwood to 1980 exploring inf luences on her early career.

Colin Hill

AUDEN, WYSTAN HUGH (1907–1973)

W. H. Auden was born in York, England, and educated at Christ Church, Oxford. He published his first book of poems at the age of 21 and by the 1930s was regarded as one of the leading English language poets. Auden’s work often addressed the dislocations of modern industrial life, as in “The Age of Anxiety” and “The Shield of Achilles.” Critics have particularly noted the broad scope of topics that caught Auden’s eye and also his striking juxtapositions of passion and suffering with the mundane elements of everyday existence.

Auden’s father was a physician, and his family had produced a number of Anglican clerics with High Church views. Auden later recalled that his early exposure to church ritual left him with “a conviction . . . that life is ruled by mysterious forces” (Davenport-Hines 1995, 14). He lapsed from religious belief when he was at school, a development some biographers have traced to the contradiction between biblical injunctions and the boy’s increasing awareness of his own homosexuality. In the early 1940s, he returned to his faith, inf luenced in part by the writings of the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Many of Auden’s subsequent works express a deep piety, including his 1944 Christmas poem, “For the Time Being.”

Auden had a strong interest in the study of psychology, dating to his teenage years, when he read his father’s medical journals. It is certain that he encountered Sigmund Freud’s works during that time, though it remains unclear exactly which ones he read. In 1926, he published an analysis of insanity as portrayed in ancient Greek literature. He was so impressed with Sophocles’s clinical accuracy in depicting the madness of the title character in Ajax that he classed the dramatist as a medical doctor. As a poet, Auden often used Freudian theory to probe the nature and origins of evil, most famously when alluding to Adolf Hitler in the poem, “September 1, 1939.”

Auden discovered Thomas Stearns Eliot while at Oxford. After reading The Waste Land, he destroyed all his poems and proclaimed, “I now see the way I want

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Auden, Wystan Hugh

to write” (Carpenter 1981, 57). Other writers had a greater long-term impact on him, however. Auden later remarked that he drew more from Thomas Hardy’s use of colloquial language than he did from Eliot’s poetry. Robert Graves was another important figure, partly because of his use of analytic psychology to examine the emotions triggered by poems (Davenport-Hines 1995, 76–78). More fundamentally, Graves’s broader search for sources of inspiration, as opposed to Eliot’s emphasis on a canon of classic texts, agreed more with Auden’s consummately eclectic approach.

Archives

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

Printed Sources

Auden, W. H. Collected Poems, Edward Mendelson (ed.), (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). Princeton University Press has commenced publication of a projected eight-volume series of Auden’s writings under the title of The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, Edward Mendelson (ed.).

Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Davenport-Hines, Richard. Auden (London: William Heinemann, 1995).

Christopher Pepus

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B

BAECK, LEO (1873–1956)

Leo Baeck was born in Lissa, Prussia, and died in London, England. Leo Baeck’s father, Rabbi Dr. Samuel Bäck, had not only pursued a traditional rabbinical education but he also took the unusual step of pursuing a secular education. He received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna. Leo Baeck emulated this step. He studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, the University of Breslau, the Lehranstalt (a rabbinical school in Berlin), and the University of Berlin. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin in 1895 where he wrote a dissertation on “Benedikt de Spinoza’s First Influences on Germany.” He studied under such famous professors as Heinrich Graetz, Hermann Cohen, and Wilhelm Dilthey.

He was ordained a rabbi in 1897 at the age of 24 and received an appointment as rabbi in Oppeln, where he met and married Natalie Hamburger, who like himself was the child of a reform-minded rabbi. In 1907, Baeck was invited to become rabbi in Düsseldorf, and in 1912, he became a rabbi in Berlin. In 1914 after the outbreak of World War I, the 41-year-old Baeck, then at the most prominent part of his career, felt ethically compelled to volunteer as a field rabbi (chaplain) in the war. He felt he could not hide away from such a major crisis. At the end of World War I, he returned to Berlin and continued his career as a prominent rabbi, theology professor, and religious philosopher.

In 1943, the Nazis arrested the 70-year-old Baeck and deported him to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia where he was assigned to a labor battalion and forced to pull garbage wagons through the streets. He made it his mission to reduce distress and provide solace to others by preaching theological sermons from the roofs of the concentration camp barracks and giving a lecture series on Spinoza for the benefit of the other inmates. After his liberation from Theresienstadt, Baeck became a theology professor at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.

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Baeck, Leo

Baeck’s major contribution to Jewish theology, The Essence of Judaism, first appeared in 1905 and a greatly enlarged version appeared in 1922. The book was originally conceived as a response to the Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack and his book, The Essence of Christianity (1900), which denied that Judaism played a major role in church history. Baeck was greatly influenced by the late nineteenthcentury exponents of the “Science of Judaism” school (Wissenschaft des Judentums) which rejected the mystical and messianic dimensions of Judaism and limited themselves to rationalistic exegesis. The Science of Judaism school was associated with such names as Leopold Zunz, Eduard Gans, Immanuel Wolf, and Abraham Geiger. This movement had influenced some of Baeck’s professors such as Heinrich Graetz and Hermann Cohen, who argued in his 1919 tract, The Religion of Reason, that Judaism had adapted itself to the modern world and had become a religion based on rationalistic principles.

Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism is one of the primary expositions of liberal Judaism. Baeck argues that Judaism is absolutely without dogmas and has no orthodoxy because it consists primarily of moral teachings that work against the development of dogmas. Commandments of virtuous behavior take precedence over articles of belief. Judaism is not a mystical religion. Religion is not to be experienced in a mystical manner, but is to be lived by following principles of just behavior that can lead to a more fulfilled life. Judaism does not believe in miraculous events brought down from heaven to earth and it rejects the notion of sacraments.

This notion of Judaism as a religion of ethics divorced from dogma certainly has it basis in the school of the Science of Judaism, but it also harks back to earlier sources with which Baeck was familiar. Some elements of Baeck’s religious philosophy betray the influence of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). Spinoza argued that the best part of our human essence is our powers of reason which lead us to higher orders of perfection. The highest order of perfection depends on the recognition and love of God, which is the source of humankind’s most perfect happiness. Whoever makes the effort to love God follows his commandments, because he realizes that love of God is the highest good. Baeck was also influenced by Moses Mendelssohn, who argued in Jerusalem or On Religious Power and Judaism

(1782) that Judaism is a rationalistic religion whose essence is contained in the ethical principles of the Ten Commandments, principles that are themselves grounded in reason and not in dogma.

Archives

Leo Baeck Institute, New York, N.Y.

Leo Baeck Institute, London, U.K.

Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem, Israel.

Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany.

Printed Sources

Baeck, Leo. Das Wesen des Judentums (Berlin: Nathansen & Lamm, 1905).

Baeck, Leo. Das Wesen des Judentums, 2nd enlarged ed. (Frankfurt: Kaufmann, 1922). Baker, Leonard. Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1978).

Friedlander, Albert H. Leo Baeck: Teacher of Theresienstadt (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968).

Peter R. Erspamer

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Baker, Josephine

BAKER, JOSEPHINE (1906–1975)

Josephine Baker was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Notorious for dancing only with a girdle of bananas, her erotic dancing style influenced Parisian choreography in the 1920s while proving to audiences that black was beautiful. However, she was most influential for her distinctive style of dance, which fused elements of ballet, the Charleston, and Cuban and South American influences. Baker’s singing abilities were noted in the 1930s, and she appeared in two films that showcased all her talents: ZouZou (1934) and Princess Tam-Tam (1935). Briefly returning to the United States during 1935–36 to star in the Ziegfield Follies, she returned to Europe before the outbreak of World War II and became a French citizen. Joining the Resistance as a courier and liaison officer, Baker was a lieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and was awarded the Rosette de La Resistance. France awarded her the Croix de Guerre in 1946. While touring the United States in 1951 Baker confronted restaurant and hotel owners over racial discrimination and segregation, which led to an official Josephine Baker Day (May 21) in Harlem. The same year she was named the NAACP’s woman of the year. Baker and her husband Jo Bouillon adopted twelve children, deemed the “Rainbow Tribe,” from different ethnic backgrounds to prove that racial harmony was possible. Baker continued entertaining and working for racial equality. She died in Paris in 1975 only two days after a revue celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of her Parisian debut. Baker was the first American-born woman to receive a state funeral in France.

Two major literary influences upon Baker were Grimm’s Fairy Tales and histories of European royalty. Her Grandmother McDonald gathered Baker on her lap and told her the stories of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Three Little Pigs,” “Snow White,” and “Sleeping Beauty” (Haney 1981, 11). In fact, Baker’s imagination overflowed with stories whose characters eventually overcame great obstacles to triumph in the end. Still learning to read through her adolescence, she often discovered friends backstage who encouraged her to improve her reading and writing skills. After filming ZouZou (1934) Baker wrote, “I had little time for reading and limited myself to detective stories, which were like a game. Books were not for me. They taught me nothing about life. Life was meant to be breathed and touched and smelled, books tried to package experience. I like my living fresh” (Baker 1977, 99). However, Ginette Renaudin wrote that by 1960 Baker read constantly (Baker 1977, 224).

Archives

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.: Henry Hurford Janes–Josephine Baker Collection. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature contains letters, manuscripts, research notes, clippings, printed works, photographs, and miscellaneous materials gathered by Henry Hurford Janes, which document his acquaintance with Josephine Baker between 1943 and 1975. The collection spans the years 1926–86, with the majority of the material falling within the dates 1943–75. Additionally, there is an unprocessed collection of Josephine Baker’s papers from 1930–71.

Printed Sources

Baker, Josephine, and Jo Bouillon. Josephine (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977). Haney, Lynn. Naked at the Feast: A Biography of Josephine Baker (New York: Dodd, Mead &

Company, 1981).

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