Dictionary of Literary Influences
.pdfCummings, Edward Estling
guided in replacing him with John Keats by one of his early mentors, Theodore A. Miller.
There remain three other fields which must be mentioned in his growth as an artist. First, Cummings was a lover of the circus and believed acrobats to be miraculous. He wanted his poems to create movement, and the movement is akin to the tension and release acrobats create in their viewers. Next, Cummings loved burlesque. He saw artful life in it, enough so that when asked for his theory of poetic technique, he answered that he was like a burlesque comedian. Finally, Cummings’s post–World War I years in Paris and his settling in Greenwich Village furthered his aesthetic development, leading to his concern for creating an instantaneous surround of understanding. He admired Paul Cézanne, Marcel DuChamp, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancusi and read such books as Willard Huntington Wright’s Modern Art.
Archives
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Cummings’s letters, diaries, sketchbooks, manuscripts, personal library, and miscellaneous papers.
Additional manuscripts can be found at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas; Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia; Sibley Watson Collection, Rochester, New York; Beinecke Library, Yale University; Princeton University Library, New Jersey.
Printed Sources
Cummings, E. E. Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings, F. W. Dupee and George Stade (eds.), (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969).
Friedman, Norman. E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964).
Kennedy, Richard. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings (New York: Liveright, 1980).
Kidder, Rushworth. E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).
Schmider, Carl L. “Precision Which Creates Movement: The Stylistics of E. E. Cummings” (Ph.D. diss., University of Denver, 1972).
Carl L. Schmider
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DALI, SALVADOR (1904–1989)
Salvador Domenech Felipe Jacinto Dali was born in Figueras, Catalonia, Spain, where he acquired a fascination for drawing and painting at the age of ten. He attended the Colegio Hermanos de las Escuelas Cristianas, a private school administered by the Brothers of the Marist order, and during the evenings took classes at the municipal drawing school under Juan Nuñez. Later, Dali studied at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, where he lived at the infamous Residencia de Estudiantes. By 1925 Dali had assimilated a number of different artistic styles, including cubism and illustrative seventeenth-century Dutch realism. In 1928 he traveled to Paris and formally joined the surrealist painters, under whose influence Dali produced his best-known work, including The Persistence of Memory (1931). Dali’s autobiographical and sometimes shocking paintings were paralleled by his surrealist films Un chien andalou and L’Age d’or, directed by Luis Bunuel. In 1940, Dali fled European Nazism and settled in the United States with his wife, Helena Diakonova, also known as Gala. Dali’s later works such as Crucifixion (1954) and The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955) frequently reflected religious themes that were absent in his earlier work.
From a very early age, Dali had access to an extraordinary amount of literature, as he was regularly loaned books from his uncle Anselmo, a bookseller and bibliophile who lived in Barcelona. Dali became interested in philosophy as a youth, and read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, as well as the works of Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, and Benedict Spinoza. From the French magazine Litterature, Dali became acquainted with the writings of André Breton and the poet Philippe Soupault, who, along with the authors Paul Valery and André Gide, promoted an experimental playfulness and irreverence that would eventually spawn the surrealist movement in both art and literature. Surrealist poets such as Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard often used imagery inspired by their unconscious minds and brought to the conscious realm
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through the use of automatism, or automatic writing. While Dali’s work was not a product of automatism, it was certainly based on images from the subconscious. Dali was an avid reader of Sigmund Freud, especially his Interpretation of Dreams, and believed that in dreams, unconscious and repressed primal desires become manifest. Dali believed that by approximating the nonsensical quality of dreams through art, access to the real workings of the mind could be gained. Accordingly, Dali’s art often contained images and objects juxtaposed in irrational ways that served to shock viewers, without the spectators possessing conscious knowledge of why the images were disturbing. Dali read the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan’s Of Paranoiac Psychosis in Its Relationship to Personality, and afterward developed his paranoiac-critical method of determining the content of his art. Dali would descend into a temporary state of self-hypnosis, wherein he would develop imagery based on delirious associations of personal ideas and past experiences. Dali’s work therefore contained limitless combinations of extremely personal images, reflecting the artist’s own desires and fears that most often manifested themselves in symbols of eroticism and decay.
Archives
Pierpont Morgan Library, Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, control no. NYPR106454-A.
Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, control no. NYCR88A76.
The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections, control no. CJPA1546454-A.
Printed Sources
Dali, Salvador. Dali by Dali (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970).
Parinaud, Andre. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (New York: William Morrow and Company Inc., 1976).
Smith, Meredith Etherington. The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dali (London: Smith, Sinclair and Stevenson, 1992).
Gregory L. Schnurr
DAY, DOROTHY MAY (1897–1980)
Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York. Though not from a religious family, she was baptized in the Episcopal Church at age 12. At 16 she won a scholarship to study at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where she began to call herself a socialist. She left university after two years to return to New York where she wrote for several socialist journals. As part of the radical and intellectual scene in Greenwich Village of the 1920s, she knew such writers as Eugene O’Neill, John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, and Kenneth Burke. In 1927, she baptized her infant daughter in the Catholic Church; Day’s own baptism followed later that year, the beginning of her life as a Catholic activist. With Peter Maurin, she established the Catholic Worker newspaper, first distributed on May 1, 1933, and the Catholic Worker movement. Day wrote for the Worker, and for other Catholic journals, all her life. They grounded the movement in their ideas about manual labor, voluntary poverty, a decentralized society, nonviolence, and, especially, the Works of Mercy (Matt. 25:31–46). Known particularly as a pacifist, Day is consid-
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ered by many to be the most important lay figure in American Catholicism. After her death, she was proposed for sainthood by the Claretians.
An ardent reader, Day often reflected on her readings in her various writings, particularly in The Long Loneliness and From Union Square to Rome. In both she recalls reading the Bible and the Psalms while a young girl and adolescent. Day grew up in Chicago, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and the works of Jack London had particular effect on her social consciousness (Day 1938, 34). Her adolescent reading included St. Augustine’s Confessions, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, and Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. She had a lifelong admiration of the great Russian writers, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy (Day 1938, 39). She credited Prince Peter Kropotkin for bringing to her attention the plight of the poor (Day 1952, 38). After her conversion, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novels helped her feel at home in the church (Day 1952, 107, 142). From Maurin, a Frenchman, she learned of the French Catholic personalists such as Emmanuel Mournier and Jacques Maritain. She wrote often about the influences of the lives of the saints, particularly St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Thérèse of Liseux, about whom she wrote a biography. In talks with Robert Coles late in her life, she spoke of many writers who influenced her, including Simone Weil, George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Georges Bernanos (Diary of a Country Priest), Graham Greene, François Mauriac, and, in particular, Ignazio Silone (especially in Bread and Wine) (Coles 1987, 174).
Archives
Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Day’s correspondence and other materials; archives of the Catholic Worker at http://www. mu.edu/library/collections/archives/day.html.
The Catholic Worker Web site (www.catholicworker.org) includes an annotated bibliography of her writing searchable by keywords or names.
Printed Sources
Coles, Robert. Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. Inc., 1987).
Day, Dorothy. From Union Square to Rome (Silver Spring, Md.: Preservation of the Faith Press, 1938).
———.Loaves and Fishes [1963] (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997). History of the Catholic Worker movement.
———.The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography [1952] (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981). Klejment, Anne, and Alice Klejment. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: A Bibliography and
Index (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1986).
Merriman, Brigid O’Shea. Searching for Christ: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). Traces the literary and other influences on Day’s spirituality and activism.
Miller, William D. Dorothy Day (New York: Harper, 1982).
Linda C. Macrì
DEBS, EUGENE VICTOR (1855–1926)
Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. He attended a secondary institution for boys, the Old Seminary School in Terre Haute (1860–67), where he was heavily influenced by one of the school’s teachers, Abbie Flagg, who helped
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him develop a command of proper English. Flagg presented Debs with a Bible containing the inscription “Read and Obey,” neither of which appealed to him (Constantine 1990, Volume One, xlix). While Debs’s close-knit family had Christian ties (his father had attended Protestant churches and his mother had been a Catholic), Debs distrusted established religion. He attended public high school (1867–70), where he was involved in literary and debate societies, although he left school at the age of 14. He then worked a number of jobs, including as a railroad fireman and finally as a billing clerk for a grocer. Debs established the Occidental Literary Club in Terre Haute and he invited a number of individuals to speak, including Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–99) and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), both of whom profoundly impressed him. He joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875, and eventually became editor of the Fireman’s Magazine. He was elected to the Indiana State Legislature as a Democrat in 1884. The following year, he was imprisoned for six months for his role in a railroad strike, and he became a socialist while in prison. In 1897, Debs helped establish the Social Democracy of America, and later the Social Democratic Party of America, on whose ticket he ran for President in 1900. In 1901, he was instrumental in the formation of the Socialist Party and ran as its Presidential candidate in 1904, 1908, 1912, and finally in 1920 while serving time in prison for making an antiwar speech.
Debs was not an intellectual, but rather a committed political activist, and his literary influences generally reflect his political interests. His early reading, however, included Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (1764), Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862), which heavily impressed him, and the partially fictitious Appleton’s Cyclopedia (1887–89), which Debs hoped would help teach him “what I needed to know” (Constantine 1990, Volume One, xlix-li). In “How I Became a Socialist,” Debs records that “socialism gradually laid hold of me in its own irresistible fashion” and he specifically cites the writings of Edward Bellamy, especially Looking Backward (1888), and Robert Blatchford, as well as Lawrence Gronlund’s The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) (Tussey 1972, 48–49; Debs 1948, vii). He treasured a copy of Karl Marx’s Capital (1887) given to him by fellow socialist Victor L. Berger. Moreover, Debs found the writings of Marxist philosopher Karl Kautsky “so clear and conclusive that I readily grasped not merely his argument, but also caught the spirit of his utterance . . . ” (Tussey 1972, 48). Debs’s reading habits were therefore critical in informing his political views and he thanked “all who helped me out of darkness into light” (Tussey 1972, 48).
Archives
Special Collections Division, Cunningham Memorial Library, Indiana State University,
Terre Haute, Indiana.
The Eugene V. Debs Foundation, Terre Haute, Indiana.
Printed Sources
Constantine, Robert J. (ed.). Letters of Eugene V. Debs, 3 vols. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
Debs, Eugene V. Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (intro.), (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948).
Radosh, Ronald (ed.). Debs: Great Lives Observed (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971).
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Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
Tussey, Jean Y. (ed.). Eugene V. Debs Speaks. James P. Cannon (intro.), (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972).
Scott Lupo
DE GAULLE, CHARLES (1890–1970)
Charles de Gaulle, president of France and leader of the Free French, provided firm domestic leadership and restored French influence in European affairs after the Second World War. A staunch nationalist and anti-Communist, de Gaulle’s individualistic and authoritarian style inclined him to employ a heavy hand in addressing domestic issues and adopt a highly competitive stance in European and international affairs.
De Gaulle’s father, Henri de Gaulle, instilled in him an appreciation for classical literature and philosophy. His father and his early exposure to the Jesuit scholars endowed de Gaulle with an extensive humanist education. Evidence of this came with de Gaulle’s regular ability to publicly quote the Greek authors, including Aeschylus and Sophocles as well as the philosophers Heraclitus, Parmenides, and especially Plato. De Gaulle also studied the works of Roman and Greek historians including Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Sallust, Tacitus, Livy, Julius Caesar, and their literary counterparts, including Horace. De Gaulle’s knowledge of prominent Latin authors also included Saint Augustine and early modern figures, including Jean de Joinville, François Rabelais, and Michel de Montaigne. He also took an interest in later figures including the Marquis de Vauvenargues, Nicolas Chamfort, Antoine, comte de Rivarol, and André Chénier. He was philosophically inclined toward the moralistic writings of La Rochefoucauld, Jean de La Bruyère, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Cardinal de Retz, Comte de Saint-Simon, and Vicomte de Chateaubriand. As for more modern authors, de Gaulle read the works of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alfred de Musset, Benjamin Constant, Paul-Louis Courier, Barney d’Aurevilly, Villiers de Lisle Adam, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, Walter Scott, Jules Verne, Maurice Barrès, Charles Péguy, Joan Psichari, Étienne Boutroux, Henri Bergson, Paul Bourget, Anatole France, Pierre Loti, and Claude Farrère. De Gaulle also appreciated the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Albert Sarrain. Finally, he had a strong interest in the historians of his day.
His chosen career path, however, was the military. Trained as a future officer at St. Cyr, de Gaulle was wounded during the First World War and fell into German hands. As a prisoner of war, de Gaulle learned to speak German. After the war, de Gaulle remained in the French military serving in Poland and then Germany. A promising junior officer, de Gaulle rose to the rank of colonel in 1937 and promoted in numerous works his vision of a modernized French army. France’s youngest general in May 1940, de Gaulle fled France for London in the wake of the German invasion in 1940. Rising quickly as the central figure among the Free French, de Gaulle headed the provisional government in France (September 1944) and quickly rose farther in post-war French political life.
De Gaulle’s political decline came just as quickly. Forced from office for his critique of the Fourth Republic’s constitution, de Gaulle pursued the creation of an
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alternative political movement opposed to the creation of the European Defense Community as well as West Germany’s entrance into NATO. French national elections in 1953 destroyed the nascent movement and de Gaulle withdrew from politics to write his memoirs. Domestic instability and an open revolt against France in Algeria propelled de Gaulle back onto the political stage in 1958 as France’s new president. De Gaulle’s strong-handed approach to domestic unrest and swift resolution of the Algerian question earned him the strong support of the electorate again in 1961.
As president, de Gaulle’s domestic agenda focused on constitutional reforms to strengthen the hand of the president. Internationally, de Gaulle sought a reconciliation with the West German state and its chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. On the continent, de Gaulle sought to prevent further British involvement economically while continuing to build French–German relations. Concerned about France’s decline as a world power, de Gaulle pushed the creation of a French nuclear arsenal and a foreign policy with the Soviet Union unencumbered by Britain or the United States. In 1966, de Gaulle withdrew from the military component of NATO. The following year, de Gaulle traveled through eastern Europe and the Soviet Union expressing his support for the continued existence of two German states and the recognition of the Oder-Neisse border between Poland and the German Democratic Republic. De Gaulle’s political career declined with the student revolts in 1968 and declining popular support in 1969. De Gaulle died one year later in 1970.
While his military and political careers are well known, de Gaulle’s career as a writer and his cultural interests have been largely forgotten. De Gaulle wrote numerous works based on his military and political careers, including La discorde chez l’ennemi (1924), Vers l’armee de metier (1934), La France et son armee (1938), and his war memoirs, Le fil de l’epee (1944), L’appel (1954), L’unite (1956), and Le salut (1959).
Archives
Centre historique des Archives nationales (1945–68), Paris.
Fondation et Institut Charles de Gaulle, Paris.
Archives du Quay d’Orsay, 1944–46, Paris.
Archives du Rassemblement du peuple français, Paris.
Archives de l’armée de terre, Vincennes.
Private Archives Georgette Elgey and Jean Mauriac.
Printed Sources
Boissieu, Alain de. Pour combattre avec de Gaulle (1940–1946) (Paris: Plon, 1982).
———.Pour servir le Général (1946–1970) (Paris: Plon, 1982). Crawley, Adrian. De Gaulle (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969).
Crozier, Brian. De Gaulle, The First Complete Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973).
Hatch, Alden. The de Gaulle Nobody Knows: An Intimate Biography of Charles de Gaulle (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1960).
Kersaudy, François. Churchill and de Gaulle (London: Collins, 1981). Lacouture, Jean. André Malraux (New York: Pantheon, 1975).
———.De Gaulle—the Rebel, 1890–1944 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
———.De Gaulle—the Ruler, 1945–1970 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
Linsel, Knut. Charles de Gaulle und Deutschland 1914–1969 (Sigmaringen: Jan-Thorbecke- Verlag, 1998).
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Malraux, André. Felled Oaks: Conversation with de Gaulle (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971). Malraux, André, and James Burham. The Case for de Gaulle (New York: Random House,
1948).
Ménil, Lois P. de. Who Speaks for Europe? (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977). Schunck, Peter. Charles de Gaulle. Ein Leben für Frankreichs Grösse (Berlin: Propyläen, 1998). Thomson, David. Two Frenchmen: Pierre Laval and Charles de Gaulle (London: The Cresset
Press, 1951).
Werth, Alexander. De Gaulle: A Political Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966). Williams, Charles. The Last Great Frenchman: a Life of General de Gaulle (London: Little,
Brown, 1993).
David A. Meier
DE KOONING, WILLEM (1904–1997)
Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, Holland, and received eight years of instruction at the State Academy. After brief apprenticeships with commercial decorators and sign painters, de Kooning moved to Belgium to further his studies in painting at the Academie Royal des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In 1926, de Kooning traveled as a stowaway to the United States, eventually settling in Manhattan where he painted with Fernand Leger and shared a studio with experimental painter Ashile Gorky. De Kooning began to paint on a full-time basis under funding from the Federal Arts Project of 1936, and the following year his mural designs for the Hall of Pharmacy at the New York World’s Fair were accepted. During the early 1940s, de Kooning’s work gained popularity as the shift toward abstraction in painting became increasingly acceptable to the American public with the influx of immigrant European artists. Paintings from this period such as Seated Woman (1940) demonstrate de Kooning’s wild abstraction of the female form, the result of which earned him fame as a pioneer of the American abstract expressionist movement. He held his first one-man show at New York’s Egan Gallery in 1948 and frequently exhibited at the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art throughout the next decade. While he was teaching at Black Mountain College and the Yale Art School in New Haven, de Kooning’s productions such as Attic (1949), Excavation (1951), and Woman I (1952) continued to push the boundaries of American abstract art. His mid-century masterpieces such as Easter Monday (1956) exhibited the dynamism and chaos of New York’s urban landscape in a way unknown to his predecessors. In later work, de Kooning would frequently integrate both the figure and its surroundings into frenzied yet unified abstract compositions.
The central themes of de Kooning’s work were mirrored in the literature of his era. Man’s alienation from society and the nightmares of industrialization were frequent themes in the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Martin Heidegger. De Kooning reflected these concepts on his canvasses through the placement of abstracted figures in a “non-environment,” merging both inside and outside space to reflect the metaphysical concept of man’s loss of place. De Kooning’s experimental and spontaneous application of paint as well as his acceptance of the chance and accidental in his work owed much to the theories of automatism developed by surrealism’s literary innovator André Breton. The dislocation and juxtaposition of disparate elements in his paintings were often conscious acts, however, as his technique demonstrated calculated reworking of the canvas. This dualistic approach to painting can be paralleled with Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “frenzy of will”
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as outlined in his Gotzen-Dammerung. This idea that art is created through alternating periods of conscious calm and spontaneous action was also espoused by the French poet Paul Valery in The Esthetic Invention, a work that de Kooning referenced frequently. Finally, John D. Graham’s System and Dialectics in Art (1937) encouraged de Kooning’s spontaneity and improvisation as well as his reliance on the unconscious as a source for his abstract paintings. Graham championed the work of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and believed that through expressive action painting, the artist became involved in an act of existential self-creation.
Archives
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., control no. DCAW209606-A.
Museum of Modern Art Library, New York, control no. NYMX91-A4.
Printed Sources
Hess, Thomas B. Willem de Kooning (New York: George Braziller Inc., 1959).
Scrivani, George (ed.). The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning (New York: Hanuman Books, 1988).
Waldman, Diane. Willem de Kooning (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988).
Gregory L. Schnurr
DEMILLE OR DE MILLE, CECIL BLOUNT (1881–1959)
The man who sometimes was identified as “the founder of Hollywood” was born in Ashville, Massachusetts, on August 12, 1881, but spent most of his childhood in New Jersey. His father, Henry DeMille, very active at the local Prompton Christ Church, had different jobs, including as a playwright. Shortly after his father’s premature death in 1893, his mother opened a school at home, the DeMille School. She already was president of the Women’s Guild and began to write plays as well. Between 1896 and 1898, Cecil B. DeMille went to the Pennsylvania Military College in Chester but never got a diploma. Later in 1900, Cecil graduated from a two-year acting course at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. As an actor, he played Osric in Hamlet and Colin de Cayeulx in If I Were King (DeMille 1959, 52). Between 1914 (The Squaw Man) and 1956 (The Ten Commandments), DeMille directed some sixty films; more than half were silent. Many of his early stories were written or adapted by Jeannie MacPherson. He touched many genres, including westerns, comedies, dramas, and epic movies. He often made remakes of his own films: The Squaw Man in 1914, 1918, and 1931; The Ten Commandments in 1923 and 1956. DeMille was a fervent anticommunist during the 1950’s, favoring loyalty oaths and writing conservative columns in the press. He died on January 21, 1959.
DeMille’s name means flamboyant and epic movies, often inspired by religious stories. In his posthumous Autobiography, he recalled memories from 1892 when his father used to read the Bible: “I remember best the evenings, I think, when he read to us a chapter from the Old Testament, a chapter from the New, and often a chapter from American or English or European history or from Thackeray or Victor Hugo or some other classic” (DeMille 1959, 31). The director explained the links with his
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most famous movies: “The King of Kings and The Ten Commandments were born in those evenings in Prompton, when father sat under the big lamp and read and a small boy sat near his chair and listened” (DeMille 1959, 31). Another reading by his father, in fact an old play about Sepoy Rebellion, Jesse Brown, also inspired DeMille’s movie, Unconquered (1946; DeMille 1959, 398). DeMille wrote that his childhood hero, the “Champion Driver,” inspired his recreation of some of his characters, such as Richard “Lionheart” in The Crusades (1935), the pirate Jean Lafitte in The Buccaneer (1937), Jeff “Bucko” in Union Pacific (1939), and Captain Chris Holden in Unconquered (1946; DeMille 1959, 40). DeMille was proud of his complete collection of The Illustrated London News (DeMille 1959, 123). But the strongest impressions came from foreign movies he saw as early as 1914. “It was Italian films, like Cabiria and The Last Days of Pompeii, which gave me my first full conception of the possibilities of great spectacles on the screen, of photographing massive movements, whole battles, whole cities, whole nations almost” (DeMille 1959, 124). Above all, DeMille admired American director David Wark Griffith (DeMille 1959, 125). In his historical movies, DeMille worked with a team of scriptwriters and historians; in his Cleopatra (1934; adapted from Tite-Live, Plutarque), he worked with scriptwriter Bartlett Cormack; for The Plainsman (about Buffalo Bill), DeMille worked with four scriptwriters. The famous director even got assistance in finding new subjects and ideas. From 1945, DeMille asked his research consultant, Henry S. Noerdlinger, “to read for me now on the subjects of what, at my age, will probably be my last pictures” (DeMille 1959, 393). Cecil’s older brother, William C. de Mille (with a small “d”) was also a film director during the silent era and professor of theater at the University of Southern California. The legendary director played his own character in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950).
Archives
DeMille Archives, Arts and Communication Archives, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Collected papers, correspondence, production files, and photographs of Cecil B. DeMille.
Eastman House collection, Rochester, N.Y. The largest collection of DeMille silent movies. The American Film Institute Collection in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Silent films.
The UCLA Film and Television Archive’s Research and Study Center (ARSC), Los Angeles. Films.
Printed Sources
D’Arc, James V. (comp. and ed.). The register of the Cecil B. DeMille archives: MSS 1400 with a biographical essay by Sumiko Higashi (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library, 1991).
DeMille, Cecil B. The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, Donald Hayne (ed.), (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959).
Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. De Mille and American Culture: The Silent Era (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).
——— (ed.). Cecil B. DeMille: a Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985). Noerdlinger, Henry S. Moses and Eg ypt; The Documentation to the Motion Picture The Ten
Commandments, Cecil B. de Mille (intro.), (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1956).
Yves Laberge
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