Dictionary of Literary Influences

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich

Rose, Phyllis. Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989).

Rebecca Tolley-Stokes

BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH (1895–1975)

Mikhail Bakhtin was born in Orel, Russia. A controversial Russian philosopher and scholar, Bakhtin emerged by the mid-1980s as an important twentieth-century thinker in the West. The influence of Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle was profound, crossing national and ideological boundaries and disciplinary lines. Paradoxically, by the late 1990s, as controversy grew, “Bakhtin’s theories” continued to shape intellectual discourse in areas as different as philosophy, religion, language, communication, semantics, art, sociology, anthropology, literature, and cultural studies, spawning a “Bakhtin Industry” in Russia and the West.

Bakhtin left very few letters and no diaries. In interviews with Viktor Dmitrievich Duvakin (1970s), a fragile Bakhtin provided a fragmentary autobiographical account. According to Duvakin’s transcript, Mikhail Bakhtin, along with his older brother Nikolai Mikhailovich (1894–1950), received a classical education and a grounding in European culture at home. Mikhail read the Iliad and the Odyssey in German by age 9, works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky by age 11, and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) by age 13. The family moved often, and Mikhail attended secondary schools in Vilnius, Orel, and Odessa. He began his university studies in Odessa (1913), where he read the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, studied with the linguist Aleksandr Ivanovich Tomson (1860–1935), and developed a lifelong passion for the neo-Kantian Marburg School. In Petrograd University, Bakhtin claimed as his teachers the neo-Kantian classicist Fadei Frantsevich Zelinskii and the linguist Baudoin de Courtenay, who taught the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and counted among his students members of the St. Petersburg Formalists—OPOYAZ—a group that Bakhtin came to know only later. To date, however, no official school records have been found, leading to new controversial theories that challenge Bakhtin’s account and contend that Bakhtin probably had very little formal schooling and for political reasons appropriated biographical facts from his brother’s life.

Members of the Bakhtin Circle (1919–28) represented various fields and included Matvei Isaevich Kagan, a student of Hermann Cohen, the founder of the Marburg School; Lev Vasilievich Pumpianskii; the musicians Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinskii and Maria Veniaminovna Judina. Members of the Circle discussed philosophy, music, art, culture, religion, and literature, shaping new theories as they explored world literature, works by Kant, Cohen, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, among others.

Bakhtin identified the “dialogues” of the Bakhtin Circle as formative. Key texts—Freudianism (1927), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928)—that were attributed to Bakhtin, authorship Bakhtin neither claimed nor disclaimed, were published by Voloshinov and Medvedev, respectively. In interviews, Bakhtin expressed interest in György Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1920), Kant, and Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), a work underpinned, in part, by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Brian Poole in “Bakhtin and Cassirer” identified German idealist philosophy, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schlegel,

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and traces of Cassirer’s texts in Bakhtin’s works on François Rabelais (Rabelais and His World) and the novel.

Archives

Bakhtin’s fragmentary papers are held in restricted personal archives. The Duvakin tapes are located in Moscow State University Library.

Printed Sources

Adlam, Carol, and David Shepherd (eds.). The Annotated Bakhtin Bibliography (London: MHRA Publications, 2000). MHRA Bibliographies, no. 1.

Bakhtin Centre: http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/b/bakhtin.htm, accessed October 18, 2003.

Brandist, Craig. The Bakhtin Circle: A Philosophical and Historical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2002).

Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

Duvakin, V. D. Besedy V.D. Duvakina s M. M. Baktinym (Moscow: Progress, 1996). Emerson, Caryl. Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin (New York: G.K. Hall, 1999).

———. The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Poole, Brian. “Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Bakhtin’s Carnival Messianism.” In Bakhtin/“Bakhtin”: Studies in the Archive and Beyond. Special Issue. The South Atlantic Quarterly 97:3/4 (1998), 537–78.

Shepherd, David. The Contexts of Bakhtin: Philosophy, Authorship, Aesthetics (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998).

Yurchenko, T. G. (ed.). M.M. Bakhtin v zerkale kritiki (Moscow: Labirint, 1995).

Ludmilla L. Litus

BALDWIN, STANLEY (1867–1947)

Stanley Baldwin, industrialist, MP, and Conservative prime minister on three different occasions, was born August 3, 1847, at Bewdley, Worcestershire, the son of Alfred and Louisa (Macdonald) Baldwin. The family’s commercial bent was tempered by a strong religious heritage, and Baldwin counted both missionaries and clerics among his forebears. He attended Harrow (1881–85) and Trinity College, Cambridge (1885–88), where he took a third class in the historical tripos. After graduation from Cambridge he entered the family business and became active in local politics. In 1908 he was elected to Parliament for Bewdley, a seat he would hold until his retirement in 1937. Baldwin forged strong ties with Andrew Bonar Law and served as his personal parliamentary secretary. He was joint financial secretary to the Board of Trade from 1917 to 1921, president of the Board of Trade from 1921 to 1922, and chancellor of the Exchequer from 1922 to 1923. He became prime minister for the first time upon Bonar Law’s sudden resignation in 1923. Baldwin’s elevation came as a surprise to most observers, including Bonar Law and Baldwin himself, who expected Lord Curzon, the foreign secretary, to receive the call. The first Baldwin government fell in November 1923 as a result of its bid to reintroduce protection, but the Conservatives regained power with Baldwin at the helm in November 1924. This government lasted until its defeat at the polls in 1929. Baldwin was lord president of the Council in MacDonald’s government from 1931 to 1935 and served once again as prime minister from 1935 to

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1937. Growing deaf and in declining health, he retired from Parliament in May 1937 and was created First Earl Baldwin of Bewdley in June 1937. He died at Astley, the family home, on December 14, 1947. Though he was the quintessential Conservative, Baldwin portrayed himself as a man not so much above as outside party who personified a spirit of national unity. His public reputation suffered gravely from his association with the specter of British decline, the aftermath of the First World War, the policy of appeasement, and the Depression.

The suite of cultural influences that formed Baldwin’s thinking is both complex and ambiguous. For years scholars used the four volumes of his collected speeches published between 1926 and 1937 as the standard source for determining the origins of his ideas. They reveal a homespun man of wide reading who bore the deep impress of Victorian values and who was steeped in English literature. Indeed, Rudyard Kipling was his first cousin, and a maternal aunt was married to Edward Burne-Jones. His public utterances also revealed Baldwin as first an Englishman rather than a member of the Conservative Party. His oft-quoted desire to retire to the countryside to keep pigs (The Times, May 25, 1923) embodied the essential Baldwin for many if not most Britons. He had a strong distrust of intellectuals verging on dislike. The vocabulary of the public Baldwin included Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Jane Austen, and the Bible. At the same time, Baldwin was on the cutting edge of twentieth-century political practice in his use of speechwriters, and virtually all his public addresses were at least in part the work of others, most notably of Thomas Jones, a civil servant and advisor to a number of Conservative politicians. Jones later wrote the entry on Baldwin for the Dictionary of National Biography. Baldwin usually edited the drafts his writers presented to him until the words sounded as if they were his own (Williamson 1999, 159–63), though his more impromptu presentations and responses to questioners bore a remarkable resemblance to his formal utterances. It is not possible to verify all the authors noted above in his reading, and the evidence available in his correspondence and other sources indicates influences that are at once more specific and less broad. From an early age Baldwin took advantage of the family library, and by the time he was nine he had read aloud to his mother and indulgent aunts Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Guy Mannering, and Rob Roy, among others. By the time he was sent to Harrow he also had read Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and it may be from this source rather than the plays themselves that he derived his knowledge of the Bard’s works. Baldwin acknowledged spending a good deal of time with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he made some headway in Sir Thomas Mallory’s La Morte D’Arthur.

He also read Kingsley’s Heroes, Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and A Tale of Two Cities, and later in life indicated some familiarity with Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He displayed little taste for poetry, and among the authors his mother tried to introduce to him only Blake took. Probably most important as a formative literary influence was the Bible lesson he heard each Sunday at Bewdley, and as he remembered in old age, “the English Bible leaves its mark on you for life” (Hyde 1973, 15).

The sum of elements from this varied collection produced a habit of mind that is best characterized as flexible conservatism, that is, as retaining nineteenth-century values while taking into account the exigencies of modern life. Baldwin’s ideas on economics and industrial relations were a combination of the cultural influences of his youth, his work in the family firm, and his early political experience, but they

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bent to accommodate the realities of the postwar world. He believed in free trade, the harmony of class interests, and the noninterventionist state, but through the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, as prosperity dimmed and class antagonisms sharpened, he admitted that protectionism, greater spending on social services, and state intervention in the economy were desirable. Fearful of mass democracy before the war, he realized after 1918 that the Conservative Party must develop a broader appeal to the working classes if it were to enjoy continued electoral success. Baldwin had an almost naïve belief that religion could act as a healing national balm, and, as a result, he often intertwined contradictory notions such as individual freedom alongside mutual interdependence, and the virtues of Little England with a reinvigorated imperialism. These odd fusions had their roots in the peculiarly Victorian notion that Christianity, properly understood and applied, could create order and cohesion in an increasingly fractious society. Above all, Baldwin absorbed and exemplified moral seriousness, self-reliance, community, and respect of the classes for one another, and in a world in upheaval, he stood as a beacon of traditional virtues.

Archives

Fourth Earl of Bewdley: Baldwin personal and family papers, including correspondence and miscellaneous family papers.

Worcester County Public Records Office, Worcester: Baldwin Family Papers, consisting of materials dealing with Baldwin’s parents and the family business.

Cambridge University Library, Cambridge: Baldwin’s political papers, materials used by Thomas Jones to construct the biographical sketch of Baldwin in the Dictionary of National Biography, and miscellaneous correspondence.

Printed Sources

Adams, R. J. Q. Bonar Law (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Hyde, H. Montgomery. Baldwin: The Unexpected Prime Minister (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1973).

Jenkins, Roy. Baldwin (London: Collins, 1987).

Middlemas, Keith, and John Barnes. Baldwin: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1969). Williamson, Philip. Stanley Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Young, G. M. Stanley Baldwin (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1952).

Young, Kenneth. Stanley Baldwin (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976).

George Mariz

BARTH, KARL (1886–1968)

Karl Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1886. He was raised in Bern where his father, Johann Friedrich (Fritz) Barth was professor of New Testament and early church history. Karl studied reformed theology at the University of Bern, developing a keen interest in the theology of Friederich Schleiermacher. Barth understood himself in sharp opposition to Schleiermacher’s “liberal” theology and conducted a running battle with his thought throughout his lifetime. Barth then studied church history under Adolf von Harnack in Berlin, New Testament under Adolf Schlatter at Tübingen in 1907, and systematic theology under the premier Kantian theologian in Germany, Wilhelm Herrmann at Marburg. After ordination as a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church, Barth worked as a pastor in Safenwil,

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Switzerland, from 1911 to 1921, where he became greatly interested in questions of social justice. Karl Barth is regarded as the leading Protestant systematic theologian in the twentieth century.

Karl Barth’s theological output may be divided into the early period and the later period. His commentary on Romans, the German edition of which appeared in 1919, has been called a bombshell in the playground of the theologians. In this work we see the strong influence of Franz Overbeck, Johann Christian Blumhardt, Christoph Blumhardt, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Søren Kierkegaard, who made clear to Barth the antimony between Christianity and culture ( James B. Torrance 1987, 69). In this early period Barth was associated with “dialectical theology,” a movement of thought in German theology after World War I that argued that theology needed to be God-centered rather than man-centered. Dialectical theology emphasized the transcendence or otherness of God, finding its classic formulation in Barth’s second edition of his Epistle to the Romans. In the 1930s as Adolf Hitler rose to power, Barth sided with the Confessing Church in Germany and was the principal author of the famous Barmen Declaration of 1934.

The later Barth authored the 10 volumes of the massive Church Dogmatics in which the analogy of faith takes the place of the dialectics found in the Epistle to the Romans. If the early Barth stresses the distance between God and humanity, the latter Barth emphasizes the nearness of God to humanity in Christ. One may compare Barth’s thought to an hourglass. The constriction in the middle of the hourglass through which all the sand passes is the revelation of Christ. This is Barth’s christological concentration and apart from it there exists no link between God and humanity. And just as the sand in the hourglass moves from top to bottom, so too does the revelation of God move only in one direction from top (God) to bottom (humanity). In the Church Dogmatics we see the influence of St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Augustine, St. Athanasius, Martin Luther, and especially John Calvin. Barth’s theology made its greatest impact in English-speaking countries in the 1930s.

Archives

Karl Barth archives, Basel, Switzerland.

Printed Sources

Busch, Eberhard. Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976). The most authoritative biography.

Hunsinger, George. How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theolog y (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Jungel, Eberhard. Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986).

Kung, Hans. Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981).

McCormack, Bruce L. Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theolog y: Its Genesis and Development 1900–1936 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Sykes, S. W. (ed.). Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Torrance, James B. “Barth, Karl,” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 2, Mircea Eliade (ed.), (New York: Macmillan Publ. Co., 1987), 68–71.

Torrance, T. F. Karl Barth: An Introduction to his Early Theolog y, 1910–1931 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, Ltd., 2000, 1962).

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Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. The Theolog y of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, Edward T. Oakes (trans.) (San Francisco: Communio Books, Ignatius Press, 1992).

Wildi, H. M. Bibliographie Karl Barth (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1984).

Richard Penaskovic

BARTHES, ROLAND (1915–1980)

Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg, France. He studied at the Lycée Louis- le-Grand in Paris (1930–34) and at the Sorbonne (1935–39). His education was interrupted by tuberculosis, but his periods of convalescence were marked by a thorough reading of French writers, especially André Gide (1869–1951), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), and Albert Camus (1913–60). Brought up by a Protestant mother, Barthes does not reveal a particular interest in religion in his work. He held several academic and nonacademic posts over the course of his career, including teaching positions in Romania and Egypt. His lack of an advanced degree, however, made it difficult to find regular academic work, but toward the end of his career (1976) he was named professor at the Collège de France, where he remained until his death. Although his work is difficult to categorize, Barthes’s influential writings have made major contributions to structuralism, semiology, and literary theory and have provided the groundwork for later developments in cultural studies.

In a 1964 interview, Barthes states “I don’t believe in influences” (Barthes 1985, 27) but “to my mind, what is transmitted is not ‘ideas’ but ‘languages,’ i.e. forms which can be filled in different fashions” (26). In his view, “books are ‘currency’ rather than ‘forces’” (27). In his autobiographical text Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), Barthes lists four major “phases” of his career, for each providing an “intertext,” a “genre,” and his own works corresponding to the phase. His early period of productivity he terms “social mythology,” a phase during which he composed Writing Degree Zero (1953), Mythologies (1957), and various writings on theater. Barthes responds directly to Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1947) in “What is Writing?”—the key essay in Writing Degree Zero—by adding a notion of “écriture” (writing) to Sartre’s famous style/language distinction (see Sontag 1968). A Marxistinflected “language” can also be located in Mythologies and in his writings on the theater (see Roger 1997). His second “phase” is characterized by a rewriting of Saussurian linguistics, as in Elements of Semiolog y (1964) and The Fashion System (1967). His period of “textuality” contains traces of Philippe Sollers, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and his student Julia Kristeva (1941– ), and is represented in his works by Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971), Empire of Signs (1970), and especially S/Z (1970), in which Barthes looks at “narrative codes” at play in the Balzacian realist text “Sarrasine.” His final “morality” phase is marked by the “currency” of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), in The Pleasure of the Text (1973) and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975).

Archives

Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Paris, France. Includes manuscripts, notes, journals, and letters.

Printed Sources

Barthes, Roland. “I Don’t Believe in Influences.” In The Grain of the Voice, Linda Coverdale (trans.), (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985).

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———.Oeuvres completes, 4 vols. (1993–95, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993–2002).

———.Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (trans.), (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).

Calvet, Louis Jean. Roland Barthes: A Biography, Sarah Wykes (trans.), (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

Roger, Philippe. “Barthes with Marx.” In Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, Jean-Michel Rabaté (ed.), (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

Sontag, Susan. “Preface.” In Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (trans.), (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968).

Ungar, Steven, and Betty R. McGraw. “Introduction.” In Signs in Culture: Roland Barthes Today, Steven Ungar and Betty R. McGraw (eds.), (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989). On Saussure and Barthes.

Todd W. Reeser

BARUCH, BERNARD MANNES (1870–1965)

Bernard Baruch was born in Camden, South Carolina, the son of Simon Baruch, a Jewish surgeon who fled East Prussia for the United States in 1855 to escape German military conscription, later serving in the Confederate Army, and Belle Wolfe, the plantation-born daughter of an old-established Southern Jewish family. In 1881 Baruch’s family moved to New York City, though Baruch always identified strongly with the American South and eventually bought a South Carolina estate. Baruch’s mother insisted her family not only follow strict Jewish religious observances but also respect the Christian Sunday. Baruch considered himself first an American and opposed Zionism; he assimilated substantially, marrying an Episcopalian who raised their children as Christians, but still attended synagogue on high holidays, and believed that his Jewish origins precluded any political career for him. Baruch’s father not only pioneered public hygiene, but was also profoundly committed to philanthropic and community service, values transmitted to his admiring son, who generously supported numerous charities from the fortune he accumulated through skillful stock speculation. His other lifelong political idol was President Woodrow Wilson, a fellow Southerner who appointed prominent Jews to office, including Baruch, who headed the War Industries Board in 1917–18, after American intervention in World War I, coordinating wartime raw materials procurement. Baruch thenceforth became a munificent Democratic contributor, particularly close to the party’s conservative Southern power-brokers. In peacetime he preached voluntary business cooperation, in wartime governmental economic direction and rationing; above all he opposed inflation, even at the price of high unemployment. Increasingly unsympathetic to 1930s New Deal Democratic economic policies, in World War II the anti-German Baruch rallied support for industrial mobilization. As a postwar adviser on nuclear energy, he effectively recommended that his country retain its atomic monopoly. Throughout, a well-oiled publicity machine ably promoted Baruch’s image as unofficial “adviser to presidents,” though from the late 1940s his influence waned.

Baruch recalled hearing traditional Southern folktales such as Br’er Rabbit from his black childhood nurse. He imbibed the romance of the Southern “Lost Cause,” once staying up all night devouring a biography of Robert E. Lee, the Southern commander (Coit 1957, 8–15). Helped by an inspiring teacher, whose gift of novels by Charles Dickens, a favorite author, he treasured all his life, at fourteen Baruch

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graduated second in his class from New York Public School No. 59 before entering the City College of New York. Despite a retentive memory for facts, Baruch, who later described himself as “intellectually lazy” (Schwarz 1981, 13), performed poorly in classics and science, though he subsequently recalled that his courses in political economy, especially on the law of supply and demand, enthralled him and permanently influenced his thinking. Somewhat to his regret, his literary and intellectual range was always limited; Baruch once described “account books” and corporate reports as his “favorite reading” (Baruch 1957, 55, 78), found performances of plays by William Shakespeare overly demanding, and spoke poorly in public. He often quoted Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Macaulay, but preferred popular novels and employed ghost writers to polish all his published works.

Archives

Bernard M. Baruch Papers. Seeley G. Mudd Manuscripts Library, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., United States. Baruch’s personal and semi-official correspondence, writings, and other materials.

Printed Sources

Baruch, Bernard M. My Own Story (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1957).

———. The Public Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1960). Coit, Margaret L. Mr. Baruch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

Schwarz, Jordan A. The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). Fullest biography.

Priscilla Roberts

THE BEATLES

The Beatles’ legendary career began in 1957, when Liverpool teenager John Lennon (1940–80) organized his first musical group, The Quarry Men. By the summer of 1958, Paul McCartney (1942– ) and George Harrison (1943–2001) had become permanent members of Lennon’s band. In 1962, the group, now known as The Beatles and managed by Brian Epstein (1934–67) successfully auditioned for producer George Martin (1926– ) of EMI Parlophone Records in London. Shortly after their audition, drummer Ringo Starr (1940– ) joined the band and The Beatles made their first record for EMI in September 1962. The Beatles conquered Britain in 1963, and in February 1964 they arrived in the United States. Bolstered by an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Beatlemania overwhelmed America. During the 1960s, The Beatles released groundbreaking recordings such as Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and Abbey Road (1969). The Beatles revolutionized not only the sound and lyrics of rock music, but also the visual arts, film, fashion, and hairstyles of the 1960s. The Beatles officially disbanded in 1970, and founder John Lennon was assassinated in New York City in 1980.

Early in The Beatles’ career, John Lennon was tagged the “literary” Beatle, due in part to the publication of his book, In His Own Write (1964), which was “compared favorably with the works of Edward Lear” (Schaffner 1977, 27). Lennon claimed that the first time he “consciously put (the) literary part” of himself into a lyric was in the autobiographical ballad “In My Life” (1965), “inspired by Kenneth Alsopf, the British journalist, and Bob Dylan” (Sheff and Golson 1981, 151).

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Lennon specifically cited the influence of Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde in his creative work (Sheff and Golson 1981, 93). Carroll’s influence is evident in “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967), whose images were “from Alice In Wonderland. It was Alice in the boat” (Sheff and Golson 1981, 153). Similarly, Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” (1967) borrowed images from Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and featured Humpty Dumpty’s final words, “Goo goo goo joob,” from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The opening lines from Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” (1966) were taken from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Paul McCartney fell in love with literature after his English teacher introduced him to Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale.” McCartney was equally enthralled by the great playwrights: “We did Hamlet, which I immediately started to eat up. I became a director in my own mind. I started reading a lot of plays, Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, then a lot of Shaw’s stuff, Sheridan, Hardy” (Miles 1997, 41–42). Beatles historian Nicholas Schaffner suggests that McCartney’s nostalgic “Penny Lane” (1967) “may have been inspired by ‘Fern Hill’ a poem by Dylan Thomas who Paul revealed he had been reading” (68). The lyrics for McCartney’s “Golden Slumbers” (1969) were taken, nearly verbatim, from the 1603 poem “Golden Slumbers” by Thomas Dekker (1570–1632).

George Harrison’s search for spiritual enlightenment frequently resulted in songs with lyrics rooted in Bhagavad Gita and other religious texts. The lyric to “The Inner Light” (1967) came from a translation from the Tao Te Ching (Harrison 1980, 118). Even Harrison’s best-known rock-and-roll composition, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (1968), was inspired by a spiritual source. Harrison was reading I Ching—the (Chinese) Book of Changes “which seemed to be based on the Eastern concept that everything is relative to everything else. As opposed to the Western view that things are merely coincidental. . . . I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any book. . . . I picked up a book at random—opened it—saw ‘Gently weeps’—then laid the book down again and started the song” (Harrison 1980, 120).

Ringo Starr’s literary influences are more difficult to discern, as Ringo composed few songs for The Beatles. But, as an actor, Starr seemed particularly drawn to the works of American author Terry Southern, whose novels Candy (1968) and The Magic Christian (1969) were both adapted as films starring Ringo. “Appropriately, perhaps, Ringo had the words ‘Buy a Terry Southern book’ included in the sleeve notes of his Goodnight Vienna (1974) album” (Harry 1992, 615).

Collectively, The Beatles seemed to have been interested in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, as it was briefly considered for their third film project following Help! (1965). Literary figures were also prominent in the collection of personal heroes chosen for display on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Among those pictured are Edgar Allan Poe, Terry Southern, William Burroughs, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Lewis Carroll, and George Bernard Shaw. Clearly, The Beatles were inspired, not only by the pioneers of rock and roll, but also by a variety of pioneering authors, and the band’s innovative mixture of musical and literary styles forever changed the sound and grammar of popular music.

Archives

There is no central archival source. Some Beatles manuscripts have been loaned to the British Library by Paul McCartney and Hunter Davies. Other materials are known to be in the hands of Yoko Ono and the estate of George Harrison.

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de Beauvoir, Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand

Printed Sources

Harrison, George. I Me Mine (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980).

Harry, Bill. The Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia (New York: Hyperion Books, 1992).

Miles, Barry. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1997).

Schaffner, Nicholas. The Beatles Forever (Harrisburg: Cameron House, 1977).

Sheff, David, and G. Barry Golson. The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

(New York: Playboy Press, 1981).

Keith D. Semmel

DE BEAUVOIR, SIMONE LUCIE-ERNESTINE-

MARIE-BERTRAND (1908–1986)

Simone de Beauvoir symbolized the socially committed woman of the post– World War II era, living her life in conformity with the tenets of existentialism. An eminent French existentialist writer and feminist, she was raised in a bourgeois Catholic family, the eldest of two daughters. Her childhood was relatively happy, and she developed a lifelong love of reading at her grandfather’s estate in Limousin. De Beauvoir attended private schools and eventually became an atheist, determining that the intellectual and the spiritual approaches to life were incompatible. She graduated from the Sorbonne (1929) with a thesis on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and in the same year met Jean-Paul Sartre, who became her lifelong companion. De Beauvoir is remembered as much for her relationship with Sartre as for her writings. They attempted to live according to their intellectual principles, rejecting traditional marriage and other bourgeois conventions in favor of a bond of “essential” love, permanent but not excluding other sexual relationships. After teaching high school (1931–43), she founded the monthly review Le Temps modernes (1945). De Beauvoir won the Prix Goncourt for Les Mandarins (1954). She achieved worldwide recognition for Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949), a pioneering feminist study of the social and historical position of women. Other autobiographical works included Memoires d’une jeune fille rangee (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958), La Force de l’age (The Prime of Life, 1960), La Force des choses (The Force of Circumstance, 1963), Toute compte fait (All Said and Done, 1972), and La Cérémonie des adieux

(Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, 1981). Strongly committed to and engaged in political activism, she wrote widely, including books of philosophy, travel, and essays.

Leibniz provided the fundamental philosophical inf luence on her work. She was also strongly inf luenced by Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism: his L’Être et le néant has been regarded as the original source of some of de Beauvoir’s works, including Pyrrhus et Cenéas (1944) and Pour une morale de l’ambiguité (The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947). Thinkers including Edmund Husserl (a visible inf luence on

Pour une morale de l’ambiguité and La Force de l’age), G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Heidegger were important parts of her philosophical framework (Tidd 1999, 18–19). In her writings on lesbianism, de Beauvoir was inf luenced by Renée Vivien’s work and the theories of sexuality suggested by Pierre Janet and Alfred Kinsey (in his Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male). She also drew extensively on the work of realist writers Nelson Algren and Richard Wright (especially Native Son, Black Boy, and A Record of Childhood and Youth); of autobiographers Colette, Marie Bashkirtsev, Sophie Tolstoy, Violette Leduc, and Michel Leiris. Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway provided answers to de Beauvoir’s

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