Dictionary of Literary Influences

Sinclair, Upton Beall Jr.

tory and economics. The political writings were inspired by Gandhi and especially Giuseppe Mazzini, whose works were scorned in school but later introduced by Silone as “the sincerest prophet and most devoted apostle” of international solidarity and political reform leading to socialism. Finally, among literary figures he knew personally, he singled out Alois Musil for separate treatment. From their shared exile in Switzerland, Silone retained the isolation of “an artist who gave himself totally to his work.”

Archives

Centro di Studi Siloniani, Pescina, preserves copies of his papers.

Fondazione Turati, Florence, holds under seal the papers donated to the Centro di Studi e Documentazione Socialista.

Zurich Central Library has Silone correspondence.

Printed Sources

Crossman, Richard (ed.). The God That Failed (New York: Harper, 1949). Lewis, R. W. B. The Picaresque Saint (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959).

Paynter, Maria Nicolai. Ignazio Silone (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Rawson, Judy. “ ‘Che fare?’: Silone and the Russian ‘Chto Delat?’ Tradition,” Modern Lan-

guage Review 76 (1981), 556–65.

Silone, Ignazio. Emergency Exit (New York: Harper, 1968).

———.“Encounters with Musil,” Salmagundi 61 (1983), 90–98.

———.Severina (Milan: Mondadori, 1981).

Roy Rosenstein

SINCLAIR, UPTON BEALL JR. (1878–1968)

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of an alcoholic salesman of Southern origin and Priscilla Augusta Harden, the daughter of a prosperous Maryland railroad executive. When Sinclair was 10 his family moved to New York City. He attended an East Side public school for three years before spending four years at the College of the City of New York, graduating with a B.A. in 1897. Sinclair originally intended to pursue graduate law studies at Columbia University, but a growing interest in politics and literature persuaded him to become a professional journalist and writer. Always fluent and prolific, in college Sinclair wrote pulp fiction to support himself and during his long life produced over 80 books, including novels, plays, and social and economic studies. Whether fiction or reportage, his books were invariably enormously well-researched repositories of factual information. Sinclair had early success with The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903), purportedly written by an obscure, impoverished dead poet, and Manassas (1904), a Southern epic of a plantation heir’s embrace of abolitionism. Sinclair’s most famous novel was The Jungle (1905), written to expose appalling working conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry. To Sinclair’s annoyance, his graphic descriptions of unhygienic food preparation in the meat factories, not labor injustices, attracted public attention, providing final impetus for congressional passage of pure food and drugs legislation. Now among the foremost muckrakers, Sinclair published several further novels and nonfiction works on financial malpractices, the coal and oil industries, the 1920s Sacco and Vanzetti case, and the absence of integrity in journalism, religion, the arts, and education.

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Sinclair joined the American Socialist Party in 1902 and throughout his life remained a committed non-Marxian socialist and crusader for social justice. In 1906 he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in New Jersey and, after moving to California in 1915, repeatedly sought to become that state’s congressman (1920), senator (1922), and governor (1926 and 1930). From 1917 to 1919 he briefly left the Socialist Party in protest against its antiwar stance, and again in 1934, to run as the Democratic candidate for governor in California. This last campaign attracted national attention, as Sinclair advocated sweeping government agricultural and industrial subsidies to combat the Depression. Democratic Party leaders and Republicans alike considered him far too radical, and collaborated, assisted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to bring about his defeat by 1,138,000 votes to 879,000. Well into his eighties Sinclair still wrote prolifically, producing an 11-vol- ume novel series covering early twentieth-century United States history. His autobiography gives a classic account of the Progressive era.

Sinclair took refuge in books from his sordid childhood surroundings. At age five he taught himself to read, requesting relatives send him only books as Christmas gifts. He devoured contemporary childhood classics, including Bible stories, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, the works of G. A. Henty, Captain Mayne Reid, and Horatio Alger. Sinclair quickly progressed to reading encyclopedias and William Shakespeare’s plays at an uncle’s house, together with most major American and British literature, poetry, and political philosophy. To encounter European countries’ literature in the original, the teenaged Sinclair taught himself German, Italian, and French, finding Goethe especially inspiring, and in his early twenties Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra equally enthralled him. In his teens Sinclair briefly taught Sunday school but became increasingly agnostic, an outlook that religious works provided him by his mentor, the Episcopalian New York minister William Wilmerding Moir, paradoxically reinforced, since Sinclair found their arguments unconvincing. Jesus Christ, however, he always considered a great teacher and thinker, drawing political guidance from his communitarian social preachings, a perspective which effectively inoculated Sinclair against Marxism’s emphasis on class conflict. Sinclair often stated that his three greatest heroes and models were Christ, the romantic revolutionary British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shakespeare’s character Hamlet.

Archives

Upton Sinclair Papers. Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana. Major collection of Sinclair’s manuscripts, letters, and other papers.

Printed Sources

Bloodsworth, William A. Upton Sinclair (Boston: Twayne, 1977).

Harris, Leon. Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Thomas J. Crowell Company, 1975).

Mitchell, Greg. The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random Books, 1992).

Sinclair, Upton. The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1962).

———. My Lifetime in Letters (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1960). Yoder, Jon A. Upton Sinclair (New York: Ungar, 1975).

Priscilla Roberts

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Singer, Isaac Bashevis

SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS (1904–1991)

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on July 14 in Radzymin, Poland. His parents were Rabbi Pinchas Menachem Singer and Bathsheba Singer. Singer was fascinated by his father’s offering of advice on religion and family matters, and how his father settled arguments in a judicious way among the people who visited his rabbinical court. His parents also influenced him with the telling of mythical folk tales to strengthen Singer’s religious faith. He studied traditional Jewish literature, including the Torah, the Talmud, and the Kabala. He also studied at the Tackemoni Rabbinical Seminary in Warsaw. Singer first started writing in Hebrew, but decided to write in the language of his childhood—Yiddish. He migrated to the United States in 1935 and began working as a freelance writer for the Yiddish newspaper Jewish Daily Forward. Singer had immediate success with the publication of the English version of his novel The Moskati. His writing connects the mysticism of Jewish folklore and the realities of the life of Eastern European communities that no longer exist. Singer has been compared to Nathaniel Hawthorne, as both write moral fables. Singer had also been praised for his children’s literature, including Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) and Fearsome Inn (1967). His writings have appeared in such publications as Partisan Review, Commentary, New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Chicago Review, and have been translated into many languages. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

Singer’s greatest literary influence was his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer, who was himself a distinguished Yiddish writer. Israel Singer left the family’s orthodoxy and became a secular writer and painter, writing stories that were philosophical in nature. Isaac Singer soon followed in his brother’s footsteps and became a secular writer. In his memoir, Love and Exile, Singer wrote that one of his major literary influences was the rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who believed that the laws of nature were also the laws of God, and that there was no ultimate paradise of bliss to look forward to. Spinoza, especially in Ethics, made Singer question the place of Jews in the afterlife. Singer was also influenced by Nicolaus Copernicus and Sir Isaac Newton (in Book of the Covenant) and Moses Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed. Judah Halevi’s novel Khuzari greatly influenced Singer. He also read Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Charles Bedouin’s volumes on hypnotism and autosuggestion and Rob Moshe Haim Luzzato’s novel The Path of Righteousness were important to Singer. In interviews with Richard Burgin, Singer mentioned other authors who impacted his life. He was moved by Lev Nikolavich Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace, and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Pan. Singer also claimed an intellectual debt to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, August Strindberg, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Archives

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. Singer’s Yiddish and English manuscripts, proofs, published texts, correspondence, photographs, and financial papers.

Columbia University, University Libraries, Butler Library, New York, N.Y., MS 70–140. Literary manuscripts, 1960–67.

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Printed Sources

Ethridge, James M., and Barbara Kopala. “Isaac Bashevis Singer.” In Contemporary Authors, Volumes 1–4, 1st ed. (Detroit: Gale: 1967), 872–73.

Goran, Lester. The Bright Streets of Surfside: The Memoir of a Friendship (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994).

“Isaac Bashevis Singer.” Current Biography, Third Annual Cumulation (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1969).

Kresh, Paul. Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of 86th Street (New York: Dial Press, 1979). Miller, David Neal. Bibliography of Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1924–1949 (New York: Peter Lang,

1983).

Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Love and Exile: A Memoir (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1984).

———. “Nobel Lecture.” Nobel.e.Museum, accessed Nov. 5 2001, http://www.nobel.se. Singer, Isaac Bashevis, and Richard Burgin. Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer (Garden

City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1985).

Zamir, Israel. Journey to My Father: Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Arcade, 1996).

Cassandra Noel Kreischer

SKINNER, BURRHUS FREDERICK (1904–1990)

American psychologist and advocate of the school of behaviorist psychology, B. F. Skinner is considered one of the world’s most influential modern psychologists and a founder of radical behaviorism. Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, on March 20, 1904. His father, William, was a local attorney for the Erie Railroad; his mother, Grace, was a homemaker. After completing high school, Skinner attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he majored in English literature. Not satisfied with his progress as a writer after graduation, after a year he began graduate studies at Harvard University, receiving his masters in psychology in 1930 and his doctorate in psychology in 1931. He received a Junior Fellowship from Harvard and remained there over five years studying operant behavior. In 1936, he married Yvonne Blue with whom he later had two daughters, Julie and Deborah. He spent the remainder of his career on the faculty of the University of Minnesota (1936–45), Indiana University (1945–48), and Harvard University (1948–74). Skinner wrote over 20 books and more than 100 journal articles in his career. He continued his professional involvement until his death from leukemia on August 18, 1990.

Skinner said “we shouldn’t teach great books, we should teach a love of reading.” His recollection of the library at home included many sets of books purchased by his father, whom Skinner recalled as a “sucker for a book salesman.” These included the World’s Greatest Literature and Masterpieces of World History, among others. Skinner also read the articles by Reuben “Rube” Goldberg in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which featured inventions that would accomplish in a complex form something that could be done in a simple manner. Skinner’s schoolteacher, Mary Graves, encouraged him to read and exposed him to all forms of material as well as teaching him the Old and New Testaments as literature and exciting his interest in Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, whose writings influenced his later research. Skinner dedicated his book The Technolog y of Teaching to Graves.

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Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr Ivanovich

At Hamilton College, Skinner was introduced to Alexander Woollcott, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost. Skinner’s goals at this time were more focused on professional writing than the behavioral science that later would make him famous. In 1926, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he reevaluated his career. He discovered behavioral science and began reading biology and psychology, including works by Jacques Loeb, James Watson, Ivan Pavlov, and Edward Thorndike. Thorndike and Skinner had a brief correspondence regarding Thorndike’s Studies in the Psycholog y of Language. Also during this time, Skinner critiqued Louis Berman’s The Religion Called Behaviorism and submitted it to the Saturday Review of Literature, though it was never published.

Skinner’s literary influences at Harvard were broad. He was particularly enthused about reading Charles Scott Sherrington’s Integrative Action of the Nervous System. At Harvard, Skinner expanded on Watson and Pavlov, integrating new ideas and methods into the already vast framework of behavioral science. The Behavior of Organisms, Skinner’s first published work on behavioral psychology, was the beginning of many in his outstanding career that was marked by a dedication to the scientific method and superb research. In later life Skinner published several works on society. His most famous is Walden Two, inspired particularly by Francis Bacon’s idea of the Royal Society in New Atlantis and by Diderot’s Encyclopedie.

Archives

Harvard University Archives, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts. Includes biographical material, correspondence, reaction to Skinner’s work, subject files, teaching machines, laboratory data, writings, Walden Two correspondence, newspaper clippings, and photographs.

Printed Works

Bjork, Daniel W. B. F. Skinner: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).

Nye, Robert D. The Legacy of B. F. Skinner: Concepts and Perspectives, Controversies and Misunderstandings (Belmont, California: Brooks/Cole, 1992).

Richelle, Marc N. B. F. Skinner, A Reappraisal (Mahwah, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993).

Smith, L., and W. Woodward (eds.). B. F. Skinner and Behaviorism in American Culture (London: Lehigh University Press. 1996).

Arthur Holst

SOLZHENITSYN, ALEXANDR IVANOVICH (1918– )

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, a town in the Russian Caucasus. In 1937, he entered the University of Rostov-on-Don, and while still a student married Natalia Reshetovskaia. He enrolled concurrently in correspondence studies at the Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature in Moscow. Completing his degree in physics and mathematics in 1941, he was immediately taken into the Red Army and served for four years, rising to the rank of captain of artillery. In 1945 he was arrested and sent into exile for remarks critical of Josef Stalin. His experiences in labor camps and other correctional facilities, where he spent more than a decade, provided material for much of his fiction and nonfiction. In 1950, he and Natalia divorced, only to remarry in 1957 and divorce again in 1972. After being rehabilitated, he was sent to Central Asia, where he began writing. In 1962

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his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was accepted for publication in Novy Mir. The vicissitudes of government policy toward writers caused him to fall out of favor quickly, however, and for 12 years he circulated work in samizdat, a form of underground publication. Some of his work reached the West and his reputation grew outside of the U.S.S.R.; nevertheless, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, political tensions caused him to forego acceptance. In 1974, the Soviet government expelled him to West Germany. He took up residence briefly in Switzerland, then immigrated to the United States in 1976, remaining there until the post-Communist Russian government allowed him to return home in 1994. While in exile he prepared his major works for publication and established his reputation as the century’s most important critic of communism.

In Solzhenitsyn’s Traditional Imagination (1984), James Curtis identifies eight writers who influenced Solzhenitsyn’s style and themes. Among the more important are Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, while Nikolai Leskov, Anton Chekhov, Evgeny Zamyatin, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway are identified as lesser influences. From Dostoyevsky, critic Vladislav Krasnov asserts, Solzhenitsyn learned to write what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) has described as the polyphonic novel, a work with multiple themes and major characters that focuses principally on the exploration of important ideas and cultural phenomena.

While literary mentors are important, the more significant influences on Solzhenitsyn’s writing are the works—and deeds—of figures whose development of communist ideology shaped the political system against which Solzhenitsyn rebelled. Primary among these are Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Stalin. By the time Solzhenitsyn entered the army, he had become imbued with communist doctrine and was a staunch supporter of the Soviet Union. His disillusionment with Stalinist policy led to his internment and internal exile. He spent more than a decade reflecting on the errors of communism as it was being practiced under totalitarian dictators. Hence, novels such as Cancer Ward (1969) and The First Circle (1968) highlight the weaknesses of the system and the dehumanization that results from the misapplication of Marxist ideology, while works such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the six volumes of The Gulag Archipelago (1973–75) illustrate the human cost of rebellion against the Soviet regime. By contrast, the influence of literary predecessors such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky can be seen more clearly in August 1914 (1971) and the multivolume The Red Wheel (1983–91). Like Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–69), these novels focus on the transformation of a nation during a period of crisis.

Archives

Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst, Mass.: samizdat materials. (Much of Solzhenitsyn’s work, including typescripts and correspondence, remains in private hands.)

Printed Sources

Curtis, James M. Solzhenitsyn’s Traditional Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984).

Dunlop, John B., Richard S. Haugh, and Michael Nicholson (eds.). Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institute Press, 1985). Essays on the influence of political writers and novelists; contains two useful bibliographic chapters.

Kodjak, Andrej. Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978).

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Krasnov, Vladislav. Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980).

Pontuso, James F. Solzhenitsyn’s Political Thought (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1990). Focuses on the influence of political ideology, especially works by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Also notes the impact of the Western political tradition that gave rise to Communist ideology.

Scammell, Michael. Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1984). Careful analysis of influences of friends, professional acquaintances, and the Soviet government on Solzhenitsyn’s writings. Also discusses literary and cultural influences.

Siegel, Paul N. The Great Reversal: Politics and Art in Solzhenitsyn (San Francisco: Walnut Publishing, 1991). Discusses influence of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

Laurence W. Mazzeno

SOYINKA, WOLE (1934– )

Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, poet, and commentator, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in literature. A very public and at times controversial figure, Soyinka has made his name not only as an author, but also as an outspoken champion of political and social causes throughout Africa. Throughout his distinguished career, Soyinka has used his work to denounce apartheid in South Africa, European colonialism in the continent, and especially the corrupt and abusive regimes which have ruled Nigeria for much of the time since its independence. Despite imprisonment and exile, Soyinka has remained a thorn in the side of Nigeria’s rulers, publishing in 1996, among other works, a scathing critique of the nation’s military rulers: The Open Sore of a Continent. Soyinka was able to return to Nigeria in 1998, his having been an influential voice in gaining the return of civilian government there.

Educated in Nigeria and Britain, Soyinka has acknowledged that the works of many dramatists and writers have informed his own efforts, though he has staunchly resisted any attempt to categorize himself or his work as the successor to one tradition or another. Instead, Soyinka has maintained that a writer or artist must of necessity avail himself or herself of a wide range of influences, sources, and material. As he told an interviewer in 1985: “There’s no way at all that I will ever preach the cutting off of any source of knowledge: Oriental, European, African, Polynesian or whatever” ( Jeyifo 2001, 123). He has found fault mainly in those who refuse to encounter or explore literature or art outside their own experiences or narrow worldviews, saying, “The barrier is self-created. By now it has to be a two-way traffic” ( Jeyifo 2001, 130). Among those he has cited as significant in his own development, Soyinka has included the following, reflecting his own universal approach to art and literature: John Donne, Derek Walcott, Sean O’Casey, and

Eugene O’Neill.

Soyinka’s plays have often centered on mythological subjects and religious rituals, especially those of the ancient Greeks and those of traditional Yoruban society in Nigeria. Elements of Greek drama have appeared throughout Soyinka’s work. The most notable instance was his 1973 reinterpretation of Euripides’s The Bacchae, but Soyinka has included devices such as the chorus or the individual set-piece in many of his works. Soyinka’s reworking of The Bacchae, however, also included the insertion of new elements drawn from African myth and folklore, reflecting what seems to have been the greatest influence on his creations.

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Though born to Christian parents, Soyinka was exposed from early in his life to the religious stories and rituals of the larger Yoruba community into which he was born. He was particularly taken by the god Ogun, a patron of hunters and a god who can be both just and destructive. Ogun appears in several of Soyinka’s early plays, and several critics have argued that Soyinka reconstructed the character of Dionysus in The Bacchae in the image of Ogun. If Soyinka was taken by the figure of Ogun, though, he may have been even more influenced by the Yoruban festivals and ritual celebrations which center not only on this figure, but on other deities and often mark important moments in the various seasons. These celebrations included extensive dramatic performances, filled with elaborate costuming, broad physical comedy, and singing and dancing, all of which have found their way into Soyinka’s plays, even those most overtly concerned with politics or social justice. These aspects of Yoruban drama are visible in an early play such as The Lion and the Jewel, which focused on the African encounter with Europeans, and in the later Kongi’s Harvest, a work dealing with the rise of autocratic rule in Africa.

His most direct political play, A Play of Giants, published in 1984, eschewed many of these Yoruban devices, relying only on powerful and acerbic satire as Soyinka attacked the rise of dictatorship in Africa, specifically the horrific reign of Idi Amin in Uganda. The play’s aggressive stance was a telling reminder of Soyinka’s devotion both to justice and to his beloved Africa. Most of all, it was an affirmation of his own professed belief that “(t)he artist has always functioned in African society as the record of mores and experience of his society and as the voice of vision in his own time” (quoted in Gibbs 1986, 34–35).

Archives

None available.

Printed Sources

Gibbs, James. Wole Soyinka (London: Macmillan, 1986).

Jeyifo, Biodun. Conversations with Wole Soyinka ( Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2001).

Soyinka, Wole. Ake: The Years of Childhood (London: Rex Collings, 1981).

———.Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

———.The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Andrew Muldoon

SPEER, ALBERT (1905–1981)

Albert Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany. He completed his studies in architecture at the Institute of Technology in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Speer hailed from a line of architects, as his father and his grandfather had also entered into this profession. After graduation, Speer became an assistant to Professor Heinrich Tessenow, who advocated simplicity in architecture. In 1931, Speer joined the NDSAP after hearing one of Adolf Hitler’s speeches. This speech became a determining factor in Speer’s fate, for Germany was in a state of chaos; however, Speer had never given a serious thought to politics before. To Speer, Hitler’s regime seemed at the time to be a good remedy against the threat of communism from the

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east. He saw this as an opportunity to help rebuild Germany, to design new buildings, and to keep Germany architecturally beautiful. He ignored the atrocities the Nazis committed around him, such as Kristallnacht, the transports of Jews to the east, and the hostile propaganda. This later disturbed him deeply at the end of the war. When he discovered that Hitler was planning to blow up everything as Germany was spiraling into defeat, Speer vowed to kill Hitler if he attempted to do so. Speer was tried at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946 and pleaded guilty to all charges, making him one of the few in the Nazi regime to readily admit his participation in Hitler’s mad scheme. However, Speer was spared the death penalty, which the Russians had advocated, and instead received 20 years in Spandau Prison, a term that he served until the very last minute of his sentence in 1966.

Speer began to write about the Third Reich while imprisoned. He had intended for his children to read his work, but as he continued to analyze his past, he began to wonder why he had become such a willing participant in Hitler’s plans. He saw the Third Reich for what it was and what it could not have possibly attained. In the afterword of his work Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970), Speer writes, “In writing this book my intention has been not only to describe the past, but to issue warnings about the future. During the first months of my imprisonment, while I was still in Nuremberg, I wrote a great deal, out of the need to relieve some of the burden that pressed so heavily upon me” (Speer 1970, 525). As Speer began to publish, he felt motivated to further his study of the Third Reich and his part in the political machinery of the Nazi Party. His work Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976), describes his prison experience and the deep struggle within himself. Thus, Speer’s influence behind his writing was the desire to come to terms with his own conscience. He readily admitted that he was drawn into the vision that Hitler and Himmler had painted for Germany. He read over 5,000 works while imprisoned and was certainly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents (1929) and Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Karl May’s three-volume Winnetou series (1876–93) also played a role in Speer’s writing, for May’s works were favorites of Adolf Hitler. Speer’s fascination with the outrageous behavior of these two men, the evil around him, and the atrocities committed in the name of Germany spurred him to write in an attempt to release himself from the burden of his Nazi past.

Archives

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel. Photos, manuscripts, correspondence, Nuremberg Tribunal records.

The Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, California. European collection.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Auschwitz (Oswiecim), Poland. Correspondence, photos, documentation.

Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, Germany. Photos, correspondence, documentation.

Modern Military Branch, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. Nuremberg Tribunal records, investigatory records, audiovisual records.

Printed Sources

Boelke, Willi. Deutschlands Rüstung im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Hitlers Konferenzen mit Albert Speer

(Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1969).

King, Henry T. Jr., and Bettina Ellis. The Two Worlds of Albert Speer (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997).

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Schmidt, Mathias. Albert Speer: The End of a Myth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984). Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995).

Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997[1970]). Van der Vat, Dan. The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer (Boston: Houghton-

Mifflin, 1997).

Cynthia A. Klima

SPIELBERG, STEVEN ALLAN (1946– )

Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati’s Jewish Hospital, the first son of Arnold, a General Electric computer engineer, and Leah, a classically trained pianist and dancer. During his formative years, Spielberg’s family moved frequently, first to New Jersey, then to Phoenix, Arizona, and finally to Saratoga, California, where the creative and inquisitive youngster attended high school. Spielberg’s involvement with movie-making began with the use of his father’s Kodak 8mm camera to document family camping trips. His early attempts at producing original short films, including Fighter Squad, Escape to Nowhere, and the sophomoric Firelight demonstrated Spielberg’s developing talent for editing, creating originally framed compositions, and formulating on-screen special effects. Upon graduating from high school, Spielberg was accepted into California State’s Department of Radio and Television at Long Beach, but he structured his classes to allow for three full days a week of unpaid work at Universal Studios. His independent short film Amblin’ (1968) had precipitated a meeting with Universal Television’s vice president of production, Sid Sheinberg, who arranged for Spielberg to informally train on the Universal lot and who eventually honored the young director with a seven-year contract. Spielberg’s initial assignments for Universal included directing Joan Crawford in an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and working on such popular television series as Columbo and Marcus Welby M.D. Spielberg’s first foray into full-length feature films came with his movie adaptation of the made-for-TV adventure Duel (1971) which was followed by the slightly more successful Sugarland Express (1974). Large-scale commercial success evaded the young director until the release of Jaws (1975), which was followed by a string of box office hits including Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Poltergeist (1982), E.T. (1982), The Color Purple (1985), and Jurassic Park

(1993). Spielberg has twice won the Academy Award for Best Director, once in 1993 for Schindler’s List and again in 1998 for Saving Private Ryan. In October 1994, Spielberg teamed with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg to form the highly successful Dreamworks SKG studios, which develops, produces, and distributes motion pictures, animated feature films, and a wealth of entertainment-related consumer products.

In his youth, Spielberg passionately avoided the classic literature of his era, refusing a friend’s suggestion to read James Joyce’s Ulysses and publicly defacing a school copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter by turning it into an animated flip book. His literary interests lay in the realm of science fiction and fantasy, developed through his father’s bedtime readings of serial adventure stories. Spielberg collected comic books from a young age and frequently read his father’s collection of the John W. Campbell series Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, which regularly featured such prominent science fiction authors as Ron L. Hubbard and

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