Dictionary of Literary Influences

Wal⁄ esa, Lech

culated during the war years. Waldheim claimed that the Catholic Church and the Bible had the most significant effect on him. Accordingly, in his political speeches, he quoted Austrian and European authors and scientists, whose sayings corresponded to his Catholic worldview. In addition, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince (1940) was a source of constant inspiration for Waldheim. In his speeches, he lauded the Austrian law professor and former president of the Austrian Constitutional Court, Walter Antoniolli, for his democratic notions, and the Swedish botanist and physician Carl von Linné for his euphoric attitude toward Europeans. At times, Waldheim referred to the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and to Austrian poets, such as Peter Rosegger, Josef Weinheber, and Karl-Heinrich Waggerl, who consistently praised their homeland. It should be noted that both Weinheber and Waggerl were committed National Socialists during the Third Reich. However, two of Waldheim’s favorite Austrian writers, Stefan Zweig and Egon Fridell, were of Jewish descent. Waldheim admired Zweig’s Schachnovelle

(1942), Die Welt von Gestern (1942), and Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928) as well as Fridell’s essayistic work Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (1927). Later in life, Waldheim was particularly influenced by Arnold Toynbee’s Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World (1976), Alan Palmer’s The Chancelleries of Europe (1983), and Frederic Morton’s Thunder at Twilight—Vienna 1913–1914 (1989). The renowned Jewish psychiatrist and founder of Logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, played an important role in the aftermath of Waldheim’s presidential election. Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, publicly asked the victims of the Nazi regime to forgive and move on. Time and again, Waldheim referred to and extensively quoted Frankl’s speech “Die Stimme der Vernunft” to defend himself against critics in Austria and abroad.

Archives

Dr. Kurt Waldheim-Archiv, Austrian National Library, Vienna, Austria. Includes United Nations documents, guest lectures at Georgetown University, book manuscripts, photos, correspondence, and a large collection of German and Austrian newspaper and magazine articles documenting Waldheim’s role as UN General Secretary.

Personal Correspondence, Kurt Waldheim to Gregor Thuswaldner, 4 October 2002.

Printed Sources

Bom, Hanspeter. Für die Richtigkeit: Kurt Waldheim (Munich: Schneekluth, 1987). Dickinger, Christian. Österreichs Präsidenten: Von Karl Renner bis Thomas Klestil (Vienna:

Ueberreuter, 2000).

Finger, Seymour Maxwell, and Arnold A. Saltzman. Bending with the Winds: Kurt Waldheim and the United Nations (New York: Praeger, 1990).

Kurz, Hans Rudolf et al. The Waldheim Report, Williiam Templer (trans.), (Copenhagen: Museum Tusulanum, 1993).

Sassmann, Hanns (ed.). Kurt Waldheim. Worauf es mir ankommt. Gedanken, Appelle, Stellungnahmen des Bundespräsidenten 1986–1992 (Graz: Styria, 1992).

Waldheim, Kurt. The Challenge of Peace (New York: Rawson, Wade, 1980).

———. Die Antwort (Vienna: Almathea, 1996).

Gregor Thuswaldner

WA ESA, LECH (1943– )

Lech Wal⁄ esa, labor activist, political leader, and Nobel laureate, was born in Popowo in northern Poland into a moderately poor farm family during the Second

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World War. His father was imprisoned as a slave laborer by the Nazis and died shortly after the war due to maltreatment. Wal⁄ esa attended local primary schools and high school and in 1961 graduated from the state-run technical school in Lipno. After a short stint in the army, he worked as an electrician in a state agricultural depot. In 1967, he went to work in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdan´sk. Wal⁄ esa was a participant in the bloody 1970 strikes in the shipyards when the communist authorities massacred protesting workers. In about 1976, Wal⁄ esa became active in an illegal but open movement to defend the rights of workers and protest against increasingly bad economic conditions. In 1980, he rose to prominence when he was catapulted into the leadership of Solidarity, the first independent free trade union in the communist world. He became the movement’s most recognized leader, facing the power of Poland’s communist leaders with cool courage and sardonic humor. He was imprisoned during a period of martial law in 1981 but released a year later. In 1983, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the cause of nonviolent change. The forces unleashed by Solidarity soon made themselves felt across the communist bloc, and in 1989 the Polish communist regime surrendered power. In 1990, Wal⁄ esa was elected the first independent leader of Poland since the 1930s, in which position he served until 1996.

Although few of Wal⁄ esa’s immediate family were well educated, quite a few were self-educated. His maternal grandmother, for example, had worked in the United States prior to World War I and possessed a small library of the works of Ignacy Kraszewski and postivist writers Henryk Sienkiewicz and Bolesl⁄ aw Prus. These authors were apparently passed on to Wal⁄ esa’s mother, who often read to her children. In his memoirs, Wal⁄ esa remembers her reading Sienkiewicz’s historical novels Teutonic Knights and his trilogy (With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Pan Wolodyjowski), as well as Kraszewski’s Ancient Tale.

At home and in church, Wal⁄ esa was also exposed to the rich liturgical tradition of Polish Catholicism and in particular to Marian devotions. Although Wal⁄ esa claims to have done poorly in history classes, this was probably due to the official communist historiography of the time. Historical stories and myths that ran counter to the official party propaganda were in wide circulation, passed by word of mouth and in underground publications. In school, Wal⁄ esa was required to study the work of communist leaders and ideologues such as Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin as well as of officially sanctioned writers and poets, many of whom were of dubious quality. Later, he was also exposed to a variety of underground workers’ newspapers and to a lesser extent Radio Free Europe, which broadcast news and cultural programs in Polish. The influence of literature on Wal⁄ esa’s life and career was indirect, mainly as part of a larger cultural milieu that kept alive a spirit of resistance against foreign-imposed rule.

Archives

National Archives, Warsaw. State and presidential papers.

Printed Sources

Brolewicz, Walter. My Brother, Lech Wal–esa (New York: Tribeca Communications, 1983). Wal⁄esa, Lech. A Way of Hope: An Autobiography (New York: Henry Holt, 1987).

Wal⁄esa, Lech, and Arkadiusz Rybicki. The Struggle and the Triumph (New York: Arcade, 1992).

John Radzilowski

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Wallace, George Corley

WALLACE, GEORGE CORLEY (1919–1998)

George Wallace rose from humble roots in rural Alabama to become a state representative, judge, governor, four-time presidential candidate, and a key figure in the New Conservatism that slowly reshaped the American political landscape in the final four decades of the twentieth century. After losing an Alabama gubernatorial campaign in 1958, Wallace modified his message to include a harder edge on racial matters to go with a distinct class-based rhetoric honed by his life experiences and career in the legislature. He won the governorship easily in 1962. By appealing to a southern memory which indicted the federal government with a hundred years of extralegal intrusion into the South, Wallace became stunningly popular with whites in state and region. His use of racial politics and vigorous defense of segregation led to dramatic events including the Birmingham Civil Rights Campaign, the “Stand at the Schoolhouse Door,” where he attempted to block the admission of Black students, and the Selma-to-Montgomery March. He entered Democratic presidential primaries in 1964, 1972 (where he was paralyzed by would-be assassin Arthur Bremer), and 1976, but he achieved his greatest national success by appearing on the ballot in all fifty states in 1968 as the standard-bearer of the American Independent Party. Though he lost to Richard Nixon, Wallace carried five southern states and 13.6 percent of the national vote. All told, Wallace was elected governor four times (1962, 1970, 1974, and 1982), not including the 1966 election of his first wife Lurleen as a stand-in. Emblematic of his political skills, Wallace reconciled with Black leaders before his last gubernatorial election and garnered a strong majority of Black votes in his last campaign.

Wallace was an avid reader of history and he was greatly influenced by the works he read in his formative years. According to interpretations made famous by William Dunning and his students, the South was ravaged during Reconstruction by scurrilous carpetbaggers, treasonous scalawags, the corrupt federal government, and incapable freed slaves. Among the best known of Dunning’s students was Walter Fleming, whose works included Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama and Deportation and Colonization: An Attempted Solution of the Race Problem. Wallace was a friend and regular correspondent with University of Alabama historian A. B. Moore, who led the Alabama Civil War Centennial Commission during Wallace’s first term. Moore’s most celebrated book, History of Alabama, was the authoritative text on state history for decades and characterized slaves as contented and carefree, masters as benevolent, and Reconstruction as a perversion of the natural order. This antigovernment philosophy with concomitant presuppositions of Black inferiority was reinforced in the Wallace home, at the University of Alabama where Wallace matriculated, and in nearly all political circles of the era. These influences are readily apparent in Wallace’s brand of backlash conservatism that rebuked the federal government and Civil Rights protesters for meddling in the affairs of the states.

As governor, Wallace used his office to recommend books to his supporters that went beyond history and into pseudo-science. Carleton Putnam’s Race and Reason and Race and Reality, W. C. George’s The Biolog y of the Race Problem, and Carleton Stevens Coon’s The Origin of Races were suggested to White Citizens Council members and others who wrote the governor to inquire about scientific explanations for maintaining segregation. These works argue for genetic differences which presage substandard intelligence for African Americans and make various other

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claims such as George’s assertion that Blacks are prone to “indolence, imprudence, and consequent pauperism.” Not coincidentally, when C. Vann Woodward and a host of southern historians and intellectuals challenged Old South interpretations of history, race, and sociology, Wallace sharpened his attacks on “pointy-headed” liberals and professors who “can’t even park their bikes straight.” Even so, during the bulk of his active years in politics, Wallace relied more on his own instincts and a stable of speechwriters to formulate rhetoric and policy than on his reading.

In his later years when numerous health problems stemming from the bullets in his spine led to constant pain, depression, and poor sight and hearing, Wallace, an indifferent Methodist for much of his life, turned to his Bible for comfort.

Archives

Administrative Files of Governor George C. Wallace, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.

Administrative Files of Governor Lurleen B. Wallace, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.

Printed Sources

Carter, Dan T. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996).

Frady, Marshall. Wallace (New York: World Publishing Company, 1968).

Frederick, Jeff. “Stand by Your Man: Race, Alabama Women, and George Wallace in 1963,”

Gulf South Historical Review 18 (Fall, 2002), 47–75.

Lesher, Stephan. George Wallace: American Populist (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994).

Jeff Frederick

WAUGH, EVELYN ARTHUR ST. JOHN (1903–1966)

Born in Hampstead, England, on October 28, 1903, Waugh was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, 1922–24, and worked as a schoolmaster to 1927. An early book on the pre-Raphaelites appeared in 1926 and another on Rossetti in 1928, the year of his marriage to Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner (whom he divorced in 1930; the marriage was annulled in 1936). In 1930 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. In 1937, he married Laura Herbert.

Through the 1930s he published a series of works, beginning with a first and highly successful novel, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop (1938), and travel books. His biography of the sixteenth-century English Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, appeared in 1935. Following his war service, during which he completed Put Out More Flags (1942) and his best-known novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), he published The Loved One (1948), Saint Helena (1950), The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), a biography of his contemporary, the English convert priest, Ronald Knox (1957), and other travel and autobiographical works in addition to his Sword of Honour trilogy based on his war experiences: Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961).

Although Waugh’s later autobiographical writing placed much emphasis on his ancestry both near and far, direct influences on his work were more immediate. Already as a youth at Lancing College he displayed a satiric tendency toward the world in which he found himself. At Oxford he was much attracted and influenced

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by the avant-garde literary and artistic tastes and the modernism of the group formed around Harold Acton, Bruce Howard, and others, including the novelists Anthony Powell and Henry Yorke (“Henry Green”) and his later fellow-Catholic, Christopher Hollis (whose reception into the Church Waugh initially opposed). His early study of Rossetti reflects a general interest in the aesthetics, Gestalt psychology, and psychoanalytical theories of the day, as well as an anti-Victorianism somewhat similar to that of Lytton Strachey. In his first novel his reading of the German cultural theorist Oswald Spengler and, much more so, that of the French philosopher Henri Bergson is immediately evident, the dynamism of the life-force being depicted as merging the past in the present and overcoming the stasis in the human world. These influences were on the wane by the time of his second novel, however, in which the importance of the satiric work of Ronald Firbank and of Firbank’s lesser-known literary disciple, William Gerhardi, remains evident.

In the late 1920s Waugh grew ever less enamored of modernist forms of art and on September 29, 1930, was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Father Martin D’Arcy at the Jesuit Church at Farm Street, London. Many of Waugh’s friends at the time were Roman Catholics or High Church Anglicans, but none appears to have been directly influential in this regard. Even the philosopher and cultural theorist D’Arcy was introduced to Waugh after he had effectively made his decision to convert. By whatever the manner he came to the church, however, he wrote thereafter firmly as a Catholic, albeit avoiding propagandizing and for a time finding it necessary to defend his novels among some of his own co-believers who considered their content risqué.

Working primarily out of his own experience, the impact of his travels is regularly marked in his novels: for example, that of his trips to Abyssinia and British Guiana in A Handful of Dust and Scoop and to the United States in The Loved One. His initial enthusiasm with the British military at the beginning of World War II soon passed into disillusionment, and in the post-1945 period he grew increasingly anti-modern. The ongoing influence of significant friends before and after this period remains important but is difficult to specify. The novelist Nancy Mitford, a friend of his first wife, remained an important confidante throughout his life.

Archives

British Library, Manuscript Collections, 1921–66: correspondence; 1932–66: letters to Lady Diana Cooper (3 vols.); 1948: correspondence with Edward Sackville-West.

University of Texas at Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Library: papers. Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 1930–53: letters and lit-

erary manuscripts.

Georgetown University, Special Collections, Lauinger Library: letters to Handasyde Buchanan; letters to Graham Greene; correspondence with Bruce Marshall; letters to Leonard Russell; 1948–65: letters to Christopher Sykes, copies of letters to A. D. Peters 1930–45, copies of diaries 1916–63.

Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, 1952–61: letters and postcards to F. J. Stopp.

Printed Sources

Hastings, Selina. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994).

Mosley, Charlotte (ed.). The Letters of Nancy Mitford & Evelyn Waugh (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996).

Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903–1939 (London: J.M. Dent, 1986).

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Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, Michael Davie (ed.), (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1976).

———.Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939–1966 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

———.The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, Mark Amory (ed.), (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1980).

Peter C. Erb

WAYNE, JOHN (1907–1979)

John Wayne was born Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa. The family moved to Glendale, California, when Wayne was nine years old. He was nicknamed “Duke,” after the family’s dog. In 1925 he attended the University of Southern California on a football scholarship. The same year, he took a job at Fox Film Studio as a scenery mover, which led to work as an extra in westerns and movies about college athletes. During this time, he met John Ford, the movie director who was to have a decisive impact on his career. Ford gave Wayne his first starring role in 1930, but the film was a failure and it would be nine years and almost 70 B films later before Wayne achieved notable success as an actor. Wayne became politically active in 1944 as a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization dedicated to expelling Communists from the film industry. As a vocal proponent of American involvement in the Vietnam War, Wayne again became as famous for his political opinions as his acting. With films that have grossed more than any other performer’s, he is regarded as one of the great heroes of American cinema and a legend in American culture.

Wayne became a confirmed reader when growing up in Glendale, where he frequented the library. He told a reporter in 1972, “I’ve loved reading all my life” (Roberts 1995, 42). Adventure novels like Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe helped him escape the pressures of everyday life. He became an avid reader of Zane Grey’s western novels. Biography, especially the stories of heroic men who triumphed over adversity and made a place for themselves in history, intrigued him. He read almost anything by or about Winston Churchill, the public figure he most revered. “After all,” Wayne said, “he took a nearly beaten nation and kept their dignity for them” (Davis 1998, xii). Maintaining dignity became a guiding principle for Wayne. Aissa Wayne wrote that her father often read four newspapers a day when not doing a movie and likely read thousands of books in his lifetime (Wayne 1991, 38). Wayne loved the poetry of Walt Whitman and one of his favorite Whitman passages was “I contradict myself? Very well . . . I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes” (Roberts 1995, 646). The Shootist is the story of J. B. Brooks, an aging gunfighter who has outlived the Old West. Wayne was so taken by the book that he tried to buy the movie rights. The Shootist became John Wayne’s dialogue with death, spoken by J. B. Brooks (Roberts 1995, 614).

Archives

Mayer Library of the American Film Institute, Los Angeles: Charles K. Feldman Papers, including letters, telegrams, and memos.

Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana: John Ford Collection consisting of correspondence, scripts, production records, photographs, and interviews.

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Madison County Historical Society, Madison County, Iowa, houses a scrapbook that details Wayne’s years in Winterset and Earlham, Iowa, and various newspaper accounts have been preserved in the John Wayne birthplace in Winterset.

City of Lancaster Museum, Lancaster, California.

Wayne’s private papers are still in the possession of the actor’s family.

Printed Sources

Davis, Ronald L. Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

Roberts, Randy, with James S. Olson. John Wayne: America (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

Wayne, Aissa, with Steve Delsohn. John Wayne, My Father (New York: Random House, 1991).

Wayne, Pilar, with Alex Thorleifson. John Wayne: My Life with the Duke (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1987).

Zolotow, Maurice. Shooting Star: A Biography of John Wayne (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).

Deborah K. O’Brien

WEBB, BEATRICE POTTER (1858–1943)

Beatrice Potter was born near Gloucester, in western England, into a wealthy liberal middle-class family. Without much formal education, she was largely selfeducated through her unrestricted reading in the extensive parental library. By the age of 16, Webb lost her faith in orthodox Christianity and styled herself an agnostic. As a young woman she devoted herself to what became her lifelong work as a social investigator. Impacted by the social misery of late-nineteenth-century England, she embraced Fabian socialism in 1890 and in 1892 married Sydney Webb, a founder and leading member of the Fabian Society. In partnership with her husband, she wrote extensively on the conditions of the working classes and the poor in England and formulated policies of reform based on collectivism and state control of the economy, work that had a strong impact on the development of the Labour Party in the twentieth century and on the establishment of the welfare state after World War II.

Setting for herself even in her youth a rigorous reading program, a habit that continued throughout her life, Webb read in her childhood the major works of classical and modern philosophy and history. The classical writer who influenced her the most was Marcus Aurelius, whose stoicism appealed to and strengthened her own sense of duty and self-control. The modern author to whom she was most drawn was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. She was also attracted to the social realism novels of Honoré de Balzac. Her favorite Victorian novelist was George Eliot, and especially her novel Middlemarch, in whose duty-ridden self-denying heroine Dorothea, Webb found strong identification. Webb was impressed by the novel Jean Inglesant by J. H. Shorthouse, an author who “had experienced that striving after inward purity of heart and mind” (Webb 1982/85, 1: 46). The modern historical works that had the greatest influence on her were Henry Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England and W.E.H. Lecky’s History of European Morals. Reading widely in liberal political economy, she was most impacted by the writings of her close family friend Herbert Spencer. Although she later rejected his anti-statism,

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she attributed to Spencer the lasting influence of his example of “amazing loyalty to a disinterested aim, the patience, endurance, the noble faith manifested in his daily life” (Webb 1982/85, 2: 308). Similarly, she was attracted to the writings of Thomas Carlyle, whose Gospel of Work found embodiment in her own life. Auguste Comte with his positivist union of science and social progress in a Religion of Humanity shaped her general intellectual framework. The positivist writings of Frederic Harrison influenced her decision to sign an anti-suffrage petition in 1889, an antifeminist position that she later rejected. In young adulthood she read poetry and beautiful prose for the first time and found special delight in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Clearly the strongest literary influence on her thinking was the 1889 Fabian Essays in Socialism, and particularly the essay by Sidney Webb, which literally changed her life. Fabianism gave her the theoretical framework of social democracy as a solution to poverty and economic inequality. Throughout the rest of her life, despite her tireless outpourings of tracts and reports, she continued to read contemporary literature and history. She was especially drawn to what she called the “literature of exposure” of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and T. W. Lawson’s Frenzied Finance, which she thought would force greater change than all of her and her husband’s labors. Her readings in adulthood also reflected her unsatisfied spiritual longings, and she was drawn to such works as Edward Carpenter’s The Art of Creation, with its synthesis of the scientific and mystical spirit. When Annie Besant and other Fabians converted to the new occult religion of theosophy, Webb had no interest in following their path, but she was attracted to Besant’s theosophical work Thought Power with its emphasis on the control of the will and the dominance of the mind over the body, which was a persistent goal in Webb’s own life.

Archives

Passfield Papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics, London. Manuscript diaries of B. Webb, other manuscripts, letters.

Fabian Society Papers, Nuffield College, Oxford.

Printed Sources

Harrison, Royden J. The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1858–1905: The Formative Years (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Discusses the common intellectual inheritance of Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

Mackenzie, Norman (ed.). Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 3 vols. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978). Includes references to readings.

Seymour-Jones, Carole. Beatrice Webb: A Life (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992).

Webb, Beatrice. The Diary of Beatrice Webb, 4 vols., Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie (eds.), (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982–85).

———.My Apprenticeship (New York: Longmans, Green, 1926).

———.Our Partnership (New York: Longmans, Green, 1948). My Apprenticeship and Our Partnership, both autobiographies, include reflections on literary influences.

Nancy Fix Anderson

WEBER, MAX (1864–1920)

Max Weber was born in Erfurt, Prussia, the first child of Helene Fallenstein and Max Weber (Sr.), a professional politician and heir to the Bielefeld linen fortune of Weber, Laer, & Niemann. Weber’s father was elected to the Prussian House of

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Deputies in 1868 and the Reichstag in 1872. After the family relocated to Charlottenburg, a wealthy suburb of Berlin, in 1869, their home was frequented by important professors, writers, artists, and National Liberal Party members, including Ludwig Karl Aegidi, Rudolf von Bennigsen, Wilhelm Dilthey, Artur Hobrecht, James Friedrich Hobrecht, Levin Goldschmidt, Friedrich Kapp, Johannes von Miquel, Theodor Mommsen (whose son, physician Ernst Mommsen, Weber’s younger sister Klara later married), Heinrich Rickert, Heinrich Julian Schmidt, Heinrich von Sybel, and Heinrich von Treitschke. At school in Charlottenburg, Weber preferred Latin and history. He became an enthusiastic reader. Besides history and classics, he read Immanuel Kant, Martin Luther, Niccolo Machiavelli, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Baruch Spinoza. Already steeped in influences as diverse as Frederick the Great, Homer, Ossian ( James Macpherson), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Weber began writing serious, adult-level historical essays at the age of 13.

Before he graduated from the Charlottenburg Gymnasium in 1882, Weber knew intimately the works of Cicero, Herodotus, Livy, Sallust, Virgil, Willibald Alexis, Ernst Curtius, Gustav Freytag, Victor Amadeus Hehn, Joseph Viktor von Scheffel, Sir Walter Scott, and Christoph Martin Wieland, as well as Mommsen and Treitschke. He also studied the history of religion on his own and taught himself Hebrew in order to read the original Old Testament.

Weber entered the University of Heidelberg as a law student in 1882. Among his professors were Ernst Immanuel Bekker, Bernhard Erdmannsdörfer, Kuno Fischer, and Karl Knies. He read Knies, Gustav Biedermann, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Albert Lange, Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Otto Pfleiderer, Plato, Leopold von Ranke, Wilhelm Roscher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, and David Friedrich Strauss. A year spent in Strasbourg with his uncle Hermann Baumgarten and cousin Otto Baumgarten also stimulated his intellectual development, as they read many of the same books and frequently held family roundtable discussions about them. Surprisingly, for all his famous sociological work on the “Protestant ethic,” he did not study John Calvin until much later.

In 1886 Weber continued his law studies at the University of Berlin and took his LL.D. there in 1889 with a dissertation on medieval commerce. After writing his habilitation thesis on Roman agriculture in 1891, he completed his military obligation, taught briefly at Berlin and the University Freiburg im Breisgau, then succeeded Knies at Heidelberg, where he remained until 1918. He taught at the University of Vienna in 1919, and was just beginning an appointment at the University of Munich when he died.

Archives

Most of Weber’s papers are at either the University of Heidelberg or the University of Munich. His Complete Works (Gesamtausgabe), sponsored by the Max Weber Institute of the University of Munich and the Commission for Social and Economic History of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, edited by Horst Baier, M. Rainer Lepsius, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Wolfgang Schluchter, and Johannes Winckelmann, is in preparation.

Printed Sources

Albrow, Martin. Max Weber’s Construction of Social Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

Bendix, Reinhard. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (London: Routledge, 1998).

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Bologh, Roslyn Wallach. Love or Greatness: Max Weber and Masculine Thinking: A Feminist Inquiry (London; Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).

Lash, Scott, and Sam Whimster. Max Weber: Rationality and Modernity (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987).

Lehmann, Hartmut, and Guenther Roth (eds.). Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Mommsen, Wolfgang J., and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.). Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987).

Portis, Edward Bryan. Max Weber and Political Commitment: Science, Politics, and Personality

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

Turner, Stephen (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Weber (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography, Harry Zohn (trans.), (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1988).

Weiss, Johannes. Weber and the Marxist World (London; New York: Routledge, 1998).

Eric v.d. Luft

WEIL, SIMONE ADOLPHINE (1909–1943)

Simone Weil was born in Paris to freethinking Jewish parents. Throughout her life she demonstrated a deep compassion for those less fortunate than herself. She completed her baccalauréat in philosophy at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris in 1925 under the tutelage of her lifelong friend and mentor, Alain (Emile Chartier). Weil continued her studies at the Sorbonne before winning a place at the École Normale Supérieure in 1928. In 1930, she began to suffer from debilitating migraines which were to affect her all her life. In 1931, she obtained her first teaching post in Le Puy. There, as in subsequent posts in Auxerre and Roanne, she shocked the educational establishment not only by her unconventional teaching, but by openly engaging in Trade Union activities and political demonstrations. In 1934, she requested unpaid leave to work in various factories in order to observe working conditions first-hand. She pursued this aim between December 1934 and August 1935, but was forced to abandon her positions due to ill health. While recuperating in Portugal, she had the first of three mystical experiences which were to turn her toward the Christian religion, although she never joined the Catholic church. Her correspondence with Father Perrin and the Catholic thinker Gustave Thibon details her spiritual struggles. During World War II, she traveled to England to join the Free French. She died in Ashford, Kent, in 1943 of tuberculosis exacerbated by a refusal to eat more than those suffering in France.

Weil’s writings show that she revised certain of her ideas during her life while remaining faithful to particular writers that she encountered in her youth. In a letter to the minister of education in 1940 (Pétrement 1988, II, 291) she states that she learned to read through the French classics, notably Racine, Corneille, and Pascal. She admired Greek tragedy and classical French literature, while her Lettre aux Cahiers du sud sur les responsabilités de la littérature (1951) expresses a mistrust of twentieth-century literature. Alain’s teaching instilled in her a passion for all aspects of the Hellenic tradition and formed the basis of her political and theological thought. She deeply respected Descartes, devoting her thesis to his ideas on science and perception. In her essay Quelques réflexions autour de la notion de valeur

(1941) she lists those she deems true philosophers, including Plato, Descartes,

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