Dictionary of Literary Influences

Williams, William Carlos

Williams decided at the University of Pennsylvania that he wanted to be a poet but that he would practice medicine to support himself. Returning to Rutherford in 1910, Williams began his career as a physician, largely in the poor immigrant neighborhoods in and around Paterson. In 1912 he married Florence Herman, with whom he had two sons, William Eric and Paul Herman Williams. Williams published his first important book, Al Que Quiere!, in 1917. This was followed in 1920 by Kora in Hell: Improvisations and in 1923 by Spring and All. As part of the New York avant-garde, Williams associated with writers and artists who were introducing modernism to art. By the end of his career, Williams had published 49 books and won the National Book Award (1950), the Bollingen Award (1953), and the Pulitzer Prize (1963). Early poems such as “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” and “To Elsie” shaped much of American modernist poetry and influenced many poets of the 1950s and 1960s. In the final years of his career, Williams published Paterson, his book-length epic poem for a new urban America.

Williams grew up in a home where Spanish, French, and English were frequently heard, but one of his most vivid early memories was his father reading the Negro dialect poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. His father also introduced him to Shakespeare. Another favorite was Francis Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse. His father once promised Williams a dollar apiece to read Charles Darwin’s

The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man. His father’s encouragement to read difficult books prompted Williams to read Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Philosophy. His Sunday school teacher at the Unitarian Church read to him from Kant and the Dialogues of Plato. He was impressed with his reading of major British poets, especially Keats’s Endymion and Milton’s “Lycidas,” “Comus,” “L’Allegro,” and “Il Penseroso.” At Horace Mann School, a favorite teacher, “Uncle Billy Abbott,” introduced him to a wider range of great books and poets. In medical school, Williams remembered reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables when he should have been studying anatomy. His lifelong friendship with Ezra Pound began when both were students at the University of Pennsylvania. Williams read many books that Pound recommended, such as Longinus’s On the Sublime, Dante’s Vita Nuova, and John Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, but he ultimately rejected much of Pound’s influence. Williams’s early poetry written during medical school showed the influence of Keats, but his notebooks of the period were full of what Williams called in his Autobiography his “Whitmanesque” thoughts.

Although Williams’s education introduced him to many of the traditional great books of British literature, the diverse influences through his family and his effort to combine medicine with art led him to read a much more diverse group of writers than Shakespeare, Keats, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, and Whitman. Both his parents spoke Spanish, and before his father’s death in 1918, they collaborated on the translation of works from several South American writers. At school in Geneva, Williams became fluent in French. In Leipzig he read the poetry of Heinrich Heine and took in the plays of Ibsen and the operas of Wagner. At home he had read Gilbert and Sullivan and performed in The Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore. In Philadelphia and New York, Williams became close friends with painters such as Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. He read the early poetry of Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Pound, and many others of less fame. This eclectic range of reading and exposure to literary work in four languages—English, French, Span-

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ish, and German—produced a poet most noted for writing in the American vernacular and choosing for his subject the local scene around Paterson, New Jersey. When other writers of his generation sought the European artistic world, Williams stayed home. His poetry, informed by his reading of the literature of more than one culture and one language, sought in the particulars of one place and its language a transformation through art of the timeless human experience.

Archives

Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York; the American Collection, Yale University Library; Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Printed Sources

Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams. A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981).

Whittemore, Reed. William Carlos Williams. Poet from Jersey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).

Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1951).

Linda Ray Pratt

WILSON, EDMUND (1895–1972)

Edmund Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. He attended the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania (1908–12), a preparatory school in the Calvinist tradition, although it did little to encourage him in the path of orthodox piety. Wilson became distrustful of organized religion, a stance he owed, at least in part, to an introductory sentence in George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905) in which Shaw discounted the credibility of the world’s organized religions. Wilson then attended Princeton University (1912–16), where he gravitated toward the study of literature, graduating in 1916. He served in the U.S. Army in France during the First World War (1917–19), and the experience changed him: he became more socially conscious and suspicious of established authority. Attracted to a career in the literary world, Wilson became the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920. The following year, he became the drama critic for the New Republic, rising to associate editor in 1926. In 1931, his first major work of literary criticism, Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930, was published. The book established Wilson’s reputation as a literary critic and he quickly followed with other works, some of which evidenced his growing, yet essentially apolitical, fascination and eventual dissatisfaction with Marxism. Over the next four decades, Wilson maintained a prolific and eclectic publishing regimen that included such diverse subjects as The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955) and The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest (1963). In 1966, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature. During his lengthy career, Wilson distinguished himself as the leading literary critic in the United States.

Since Wilson was an avid reader and a professional critic, his literary influences are numerous and varied, although some authors are more significant than others. In “A Modest Self-Tribute” (1952), Wilson relates how Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine was one of his earliest literary influences. Taine’s History of English Literature (written in 1864; translated 1871–72) introduced him to the skillful use of literary biog-

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raphy, or a novelistic approach to describing an author’s background (Groth 1989, 8–9; Castronovo 1984, 24; Castronovo 1998, 31–32). Other early influences included, as mentioned above, Shaw, who Wilson acknowledged in his essays in the New Yorker entitled “A Prelude” (1967), and H. L. Mencken, both of whom Wilson saw as “prophets of new eras in their national cultures” (Kriegel 1971, 9). In fact, much of Wilson’s early writing appears to be modeled after Mencken, although Leonard Kriegel suggests that the student outgrew the teacher (Kriegel 1971, 8). One teacher whose influence stayed with Wilson throughout his life was Christian Gauss, his professor of European literature at Princeton who Wilson later honored in “Christian Gauss as a Teacher of Literature” (Dabney 1983, 45–66). Other documented literary influences included James Huneker, Henry James, Voltaire, Jules Michelet, and Karl Marx (Dabney 1983, xvi-xvii).

Archives

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Edmund Wilson Library, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Wilson’s personal library.

This is the best primary source for Wilson’s literary influences.

Printed Sources

Castronovo, David. Edmund Wilson (Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1984).

———. Edmund Wilson Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998). Dabney, Lewis M. (ed.). The Portable Edmund Wilson (New York: Viking, 1983). Frank, Charles P. Edmund Wilson (New York: Twayne, 1970).

Groth, Janet. Edmund Wilson: A Critic For Our Time (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1989).

Kriegel, Leonard. Edmund Wilson (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971).

Wain, John (ed.). Edmund Wilson: The Man and His Work (New York: New York University Press, 1978).

Scott Lupo

WILSON, THOMAS WOODROW (1856–1924)

Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia. Son of a Presbyterian minister, he studied at Princeton (1875–79) and Johns Hopkins (1883–85), gaining his Ph.D. Thereafter he taught at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan and became a professor of jurisprudence and political economy at Princeton in 1890. He was chosen president of the university in 1902. In 1910, he began a political career and successfully ran for governor of New Jersey as a Democrat. An energetic reformer, he became the Progressive movement’s hope and won the presidential election of 1912 owing to the split in the Republican Party. He continued a domestic reformist program called “New Freedom” and repeatedly intervened in Latin America. During the Great War and its diplomatic conflicts resulting from Great Britain’s naval blockade and Germany’s unlimited submarine campaign, Wilson strove for the role of mediator. But the Imperial German government’s uncompromising position drew the United States in, and on April 6, 1917, war was declared. In January 1918 Wilson announced his war aims in the form of the “Fourteen Points” and quickly became the preeminent supporter of an international collective security system. In much of

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the world he was therefore hailed as a savior. In 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, the compromises of realpolitik fell short of Wilson’s idealist program, although he championed a League of Nations. But Wilson refused concessions to his domestic opponents, and the ratification of the Versailles Treaty failed in Congress (November 19, 1919, and March 19, 1920) after the president’s health had collapsed.

Wilson’s general reading was intensive rather than extensive. Toward the end of his professorship at Princeton he intended to read a play of Shakespeare’s each night but probably never carried out this goal systematically; Henry V was one of his favorite plays. As a young student Wilson recorded his reading interests in an

Index Rerum (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 1:83–127), a notebook revealing his affection for English life and letters, its quotations largely coming from historians and politicians, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, and Thomas Babington Macaulay.

In a talk with his friend Edward M. House in 1914, Wilson mentioned the British writers Edmund Burke and Walter Bagehot as the major influences on his development (Link 1966–94, 31:279). In his essay Edmund Burke: The Man and His Times (1893) Wilson proclaimed the urgency of reform and insisted with Burke that “it is both better and easier to reform than to tear down and reconstruct” (Link 1966–94, 8:342–43). Earlier he had been inspired by Bagehot’s English Constitution, after which he deliberately modeled his own Congressional Government (1885). Wilson also drew on Sir Henry Maine’s writings in comparative law to shape the boundaries of his studies on democratic government. In 1898 he lectured on Burke, Bagehot, and Maine at Johns Hopkins (Link 1966–94, 10:408–61). Alexis Clérel de Tocqueville and Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu also figured prominently in Wilson’s numerous lectures on great leaders of political thought. With Tocqueville Wilson shared the notion of political habit (Link 1966–94, 9:374–76). Francis Amasa Walker’s ideas on the social preconditions of industrial progress were of great interest to Wilson in his unpublished History of Political Economy in the United States (Link 1966–94, 4:628–63), especially Walker’s criticism of orthodox liberalism arguing that economic forces were not selfcorrecting. James Bryce in The American Commonwealth had high praise for Wilson’s scholarly achievements; when in 1889 Wilson reviewed Bryce’s book for the Political Science Quarterly, he found it admirable but also thought that it fell short of the highest excellence. Another contemporary theoretician of the American Constitution was Hermann Eduard von Holst, whose works Wilson knew well and reviewed favorably (Link 1966–94, 5:490–99). Wilson followed an early ambition to match John Richard Green’s History of the English People when he wrote a popular history of the United States entitled A History of the American People (1902).

In his academic works of the 1880s Wilson drew extensively on German scholarship on law and administration. In particular he used Otto von Sarwey’s Allgemeines Verwaltungsrecht and the writings of Adolf Merkel, part of which he carefully translated and digested (Link 1966–94, 7:249–69). Wilson based The State (1889), considered his most important scholarly work, on the series entitled Handbuch des Oeffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart edited by Heinrich Marquardsen. John Mulder, author of a study of Wilson’s scholarly career, even finds some “rather thinly veiled plagiarism” in Wilson’s culling from German political and administrative historians (Mulder 1978, 103; cf. Link 1966–94, 6:244–52).

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Archives

Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson: 278,700 items relating to Wilson’s life.

Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., Woodrow Wilson Papers: mainly material relating to Wilson’s years as university president.

Printed Sources

Ambrosius, Lloyd E. Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1991).

Axson, Stockton. “Brother Woodrow”: A Memoir of Woodrow Wilson, Arthur S. Link (ed.), (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Contains reminiscences on Wilson’s taste in literature by his brother-in-law, 107–11.

Bragdon, Henry W. Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

Link, Arthur S. Wilson, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947–65).

Link, Arthur S. et al. (eds.). The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 69 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966–94).

Mulder, John M. Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

Schulte Nordholt, Jan W. Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

Thorsen, Niels A. The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 1875–1910 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Alexander Sedlmaier

WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG JOSEF JOHANN (1889–1951)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna, Austria, the youngest of eight children of Karl Wittgenstein, a wealthy industrialist, and his wife, Leopoldine, née Kalmus. Both sides of his family were Jewish but led secular lives and had converted to Roman Catholicism in order to be accepted into the highest echelons of Viennese society. He was home-schooled until age 14. Two brothers and possibly a third were suicides. His parents frequently hosted Eduard Hanslick, Gustav Mahler, Bruno Walter, Johannes Brahms, and other prominent figures in the musical world. Wittgenstein early learned to love Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Felix Mendelssohn, and lifelong he preferred talking about music to talking about philosophy.

Wittgenstein and Adolf Hitler, born six days apart, were schoolmates at the Realgymnasium (high school) in Linz, Austria, but only conflicting evidence exists of the extent and nature of their contact with each other. Wittgenstein’s adolescence coincided with an extraordinary Viennese cult of enthusiasm for Sex and Character, whose bizarre 23-year-old author, Otto Weininger, committed suicide a few months after its publication in 1903. Wittgenstein never ceased to admire this book, even later recommending it to such steadfastly unreceptive colleagues as George Edward Moore.

Wittgenstein attended the Technische Hochschule in Berlin from 1906 to 1908 to study mechanical engineering, then pursued aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester from 1908 to 1911. His visit to Gottlob Frege in 1911

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persuaded him toward mathematical logic and philosophy. Frege urged him to study under Bertrand Russell at the University of Cambridge. From 1912 to 1913 he was supervised but not favorably influenced by William Ernest Johnson at Kings College, Cambridge. He abandoned Cambridge, spent much time from 1913 to 1950 in Norway, enlisted in the Austrian artillery in 1914, fought on several fronts, and spent the last 10 months of World War I as a prisoner of war in Italy.

After the war he finished the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that he had begun at Cambridge. He earned his living as a schoolteacher from 1920 to 1926, during which time he read Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Lev Tolstoy. He served in 1926 as gardener at a monastery, and from 1926 to 1928 as co-architect of his sister Gretl’s mansion. He returned as a fellow to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1929, and was professor there from 1939 to 1947 but worked as an orderly at Guy’s Hospital, London, from 1941 to 1944. He was naturalized British in 1938. Among his Cambridge friends was the economist Piero Sraffa.

Wittgenstein never read Hume or several other key philosophers and never became well-read in philosophy. He did not understand G. W. F. Hegel and seemed to confuse Hegel’s project with that of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. He labeled some thinkers “deep,” such as Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley, and others “shallow,” such as Arthur Schopenhauer. He believed that he had finished philosophy with the Tractatus, but in the 1930s realized that philosophy remained unfinished, and returned to it. His subsequent philosophical work was almost entirely self-critical, directed toward repudiating the Tractatus.

Wittgenstein had many character flaws, yet, to his credit, he was explicitly aware and ashamed of most of them. He was a self-confessed coward and sneak, intolerant of intellects lesser than his, and quick-tempered. He was ascetic but cultured. His secretive, intensely private nature is attributable to paranoia about his homosexuality. In England, he had semi-secret homosexual relationships with Frank Plumpton Ramsey, Francis Skinner, and other intellectuals.

For Wittgenstein, the world’s two most profound thinkers were St. Augustine and Søren Kierkegaard. He admired William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. Among the other writers he favored were Oswald Spengler, Franz Grillparzer, Charles Dickens, John Maynard Keynes, Max Kalbeck, Richard Wagner, Johann Georg Hamann, Karl Kraus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Samuel Johnson, physicists Ludwig Boltzmann and Heinrich Hertz, and architect Adolf Loos. Some interpreters have noted similarities between Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, but there is no evidence that Pascal influenced Wittgenstein.

Archives

Wittgenstein’s papers and especially his correspondence are in widely scattered repositories, the six most significant being Trinity College Library, Cambridge; the Austrian National Library, Vienna; Bodleian Library, Oxford; Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario; Brenner-Archiv, University of Innsbruck, Austria; and the Wittgenstein Archives, University of Bergen, Norway, which, since its founding in 1990, has aimed to create a complete digital version of Wittgenstein’s literary estate.

Printed Sources

Cornish, Kimberley. The Jew of Linz: Wittgenstein, Hitler and Their Secret Battle for the Mind

(London: Century, 1998).

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Flowers, F. A. (ed.). Portraits of Wittgenstein (Bristol, England: Thoemmes, 1999).

Janik, Allan. Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 2001).

Janik, Allan, and Hans Veigl. Wittgenstein in Vienna: A Biographical Excursion through the City and Its History (New York: Springer, 1998).

Klagge, James C. (ed.). Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

McGuinness, Brian. Wittgenstein: A Life: Young Ludwig, 1889–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

McGuinness, Brian, and Georg Henrik von Wright (eds.). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters: Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey, and Sraffa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, with a Biographical Sketch by G. H. von Wright, 2nd edition, with Wittgenstein’s Letters to Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Rhees, Rush (ed.). Recollections of Wittgenstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Sluga, Hans, and David G. Stern (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen: Project Report 1990–1993 and Critical Evaluation (Bergen, Norway: Wittgensteinarkivet, 1995).

Eric v.d. Luft

WOJTYLA, KAROL

See John Paul II.

WOOLF, VIRGINIA (1882–1941)

Virginia Woolf was born in London, the daughter of Leslie Stephen, eminent Victorian agnostic, historian, and man of letters. She was educated informally at home; when she was 16, she took lessons in Latin and Greek. After her father’s death, she joined her siblings in setting up house in the Bloomsbury district of London, which became the focus of the “Bloomsbury Group.” She became an accomplished book reviewer, and in 1912 married Leonard Woolf (1880–1969). Two serious mental breakdowns in her youth were followed by a third after the completion of her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). A printing press bought for occupational therapy was the origin of the Hogarth Press, a successful business through which the Woolfs published many notable books, including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and the Standard [English] Edition of Sigmund Freud, as well as her own novels. Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927),

Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931) established her as a literary novelist of high distinction; The Years (1937), a family saga, brought commercial success. In A Room of One’s Own (1929) she protested the economic and intellectual subjection of women. In 1941, distressed by the war and the threat of renewed mental illness, she committed suicide.

Conscious of her own intellectual powers and resentful of her exclusion, as a female, from formal education, Woolf was a passionate but conflicted reader. Her father had guided her early reading, first of T. B. Macaulay and other Victorian writers, then, starting with Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages, in English literature of the Renaissance. Much of what she read and her reactions to it may be traced in her

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diaries, and in her published reviews and essays; the notes she made while reading have been calendared by Brenda Silver. Her series title for her two collections of literary essays, The Common Reader (1925, 1932), asserts amateur status, although she had become as professional and productive a writer as her father. At the time of her death she was planning a history of women’s contributions as writers and readers to English literature. Allusions in her novels, which play a crucial role in the development of meaning, show that her creative imagination drew heavily on her reading of earlier literature, especially of the Renaissance. She was less engaged by contemporary writers. One exception is James Joyce, whose Ulysses (1922), a novel that she disliked yet uneasily respected, suggested the possibilities of a novel set in a single day and thus contributed a structural principle to Mrs. Dalloway.

Archives

Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. Diaries, letters, literary manuscripts, reading notebooks.

Special Collections, Sussex University Library, Brighton, England. Letters, literary manuscripts, family papers, reading notebooks.

Library, Washington State University, Pullman, Wash. The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Short-title catalogue at: http://www.wsylibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/woolflibrary.htm.

Printed Sources

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography [1972], rev. ed. (London: Pimlico, 1996). Dusinberre, Juliet. Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? (Iowa City,

Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1997).

Fox, Alice. Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

Schlack, Beverly Ann. Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf ’s Use of Literary Allusion (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979).

Silver, Brenda R. Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf (1915–1941), 5 vols. Anne Olivier Bell (ed.), (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977–84).

———.The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (ed.), 6 vols. projected (London: Hogarth Press, 1986– ).

———.A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909, Mitchell A. Leaska (ed.), (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990).

John D. Baird

WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD (1867–1959)

Frank Lloyd Wright was born at Richland Center, Wisconsin, into a conservative Unitarian family. At the age of 12, Wright moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he attended high school and enjoyed a placid life amid the rural countryside. In 1885 he began studying under Allan Conover, the dean of the University of Wisconsin’s Engineering Department. Two years later, he moved to Chicago to work under the architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee, with whom he produced his first building, the Wright family’s Unity Chapel. Wright also worked for the team of engineer Dankmar Adler and renowned architect Louis Sullivan, producing residential designs from their Chicago firm. By 1893, Wright had established his own firm in Chicago, which he would later move (along with his place of residence) to Oak

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Park, Illinois. The first decade of the twentieth century saw Wright formulate his highly influential prairie house style, typified in such buildings as the Robie House in Chicago and the Martin House in Buffalo, New York. In 1909, Wright moved to Germany but returned two years later to construct his Taliesin home at Spring Green, Wisconsin. Wright established a fellowship at Taliesin and lived there until fire claimed the dwelling in 1914. In the years to come, Wright would rebuild the structure as well as design and construct several of the most important buildings of the twentieth century. These include the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, “Fallingwater” in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, and Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he spent the last 20 years of his life. By the time of his death Wright had published many influential and significant treatises on architecture. Over 400 of his uniquely designed structures remain standing at the time of this publication.

Influential to Wright’s style of architecture were the copious writings of his mentor, Louis Sullivan, who espoused that form should always follow function in design. Sullivan was critical of architectural styles that had their basis in classicism and believed that architecture should always visually reflect the intent for which a building was to be used. This led Wright to develop a level of unprecedented geometric abstraction best typified by the designs for his prairie style dwellings. Abandoning traditional floor plans and contemporary ornamentation, Wright focused on the use of horizontal planes and low pitched rooflines with deep overhangs to give the interior space of his dwellings a sense of shelter without confinement. Following the notions of organic form found in John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, Wright ensured that the design of his structures allowed for the connection of interior spaces with their natural surroundings. This notion of using natural forms and materials in architecture was paralleled by the arts and crafts movement in design during the early twentieth century, which Wright became acquainted with during his extensive European lecture circuits. The reverence of nature and the primacy of unity, truth, harmony, and simplicity in all manner of production were concepts that Wright first heard espoused in his childhood introductions to the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and William Blake.

Archives

The Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona. Drawings, manuscripts, books (including volumes from the libraries of Wright’s father and paternal grandfather, some dating back to 1666), periodicals, correspondence.

The Getty Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles, California. State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. Major collection of materials about

Wright’s life and times.

Printed Sources

Meehan, Patrick J. (ed.). The Master Architect: Conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1990).

Secrest, Meryle. Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

Twombly, Robert. Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1987).

Wright, Frank Lloyd. Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, Bruce Brooks Pfieffer (ed.), vols. 1–5 (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1992–95).

Gregory L. Schnurr

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WRIGHT, RICHARD NATHANIEL (1908–60)

Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. When he was five years old, his father deserted the family to live with another woman, leaving his mother to raise him and his younger brother without his father’s financial and emotional support. Two years later, Wright’s mother was stricken with the first of many paralytic strokes; thus, Wright spent much of his childhood in the home of his maternal grandparents under the care of his grandmother. Wright’s grandmother, Margaret Bolden, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, insisted that her home’s occupants follow her religious beliefs. Although Wright rejected religion, the fiery sermons and metaphorical biblical stories he heard as a child evoked his budding imagination and proved to have great impact on his work. In 1925, Wright left his mother in the care of his grandmother and moved to Memphis, Tennessee. A year later, he moved to Chicago where he joined the Communist Party. With only a high school education, he began his successful writing career. By the time he published The Outsider in 1953, Wright, his wife, and his two children had become residents of France, joining other American expatriates. He died from a heart attack while living in France.

In his autobiography, Black Boy (American Hunger), Wright tells readers of his voracious reading habits. According to Wright, after reading A Book of Prefaces by H. L. Mencken, he learned that words could be used as weapons. Reading Mencken led him to discover other writers. Among those mentioned is Theodore Dreiser, author of Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie. Dreiser’s two novels informed Wright’s sense of realism and naturalism, two elements characteristic of Wright’s fiction. He also notes that Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street helped him to realize the importance of point of view in narrative construction. Wright credits Josef Stalin’s The National and Colonial Question with inspiring the idea that the unification of diverse minorities is possible. This idea is expressed in his first anthology of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), and in his most famous novel, Native Son (1940). The novel, which is set in Chicago, features a 20-year old Black male who accidentally murders his white employer’s daughter and is subsequently represented by a Communist Jewish attorney. While living in France, Wright wrote The Outsider (1953), an existentialist novel that best expresses his disillusionment with communism and his rejection of religion. This novel shows the influences of existentialists Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, but Albert Camus’s novel

The Stranger seems to have been most influential. Readers may also note the influences of Friedrich Nietzsche and of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Wright was also greatly interested in psychology. Savage Holiday (1954) reflects the influences of Frederic Wertham’s Dark Legend, a book based on the case of Clinton Brewer, a teenager who murdered his mother in the 1930s. Further, Wright’s novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground,” was clearly inspired by his reading of Fyodor Dostoyesky’s Notes from the Underground.

Wright’s interests in religion and politics are present in his travel narratives. In Black Power (1954), which is about his trip to the reformed Gold Coast under the leadership of Kwame Nkrume and his observations of the country’s traditional religious practices, Wright references a number of works. Among those named are Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery and W. Walton Claridge’s A History of the Gold Coast, v. 1. Later in Pagan Spain (1957), Wright documents his trip to Spain and criticizes Catholicism and ruler Francisco Franco. In preparation for this trip

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