Dictionary of Literary Influences

Derrida, Jacques

DERRIDA, JACQUES (1930– )

Jacques Derrida was born in El-Biar near Algiers to Aimé Derrida and Georgette Safar. Derrida enrolled at the Lycée Ben Aknoun in 1941, but was expelled on the first day of the school year as the school had exceeded its quota of Jews. He returned to the Lycée Ben Aknoun, which he attended from 1943 to 1947. He spent the next year at the Lycée Gauthier in Algiers before going to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris from 1949 to 1952 to study philosophy. He attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure from 1952 to 1953, where he met fellow Algerian Pierre Althusser, with whom he formed an enduring friendship. In the following year he wrote his higher studies dissertation, “The Problem of Genesis in the Philosophy of Edmund Husserl.” In 1957 he passed the agrégation and received a grant as a special auditor at Harvard University to study the unpublished work of phenomenologist philosopher Edmund Husserl. In this same year, Derrida also began to read the works of James Joyce. Under the literary influence of Joyce, Derrida produced what may be regarded as his first major work, a “philosophical” introductory essay to his translation of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, perhaps the first work of what has come to be known in the popular imagination as “deconstruction.”

Thus can Derrida’s deconstructive writing be considered as the complex result of both literary and philosophical influences, although it is irreducible to neither. Derrida’s main concern is the deconstruction of the “metaphysics of presence.” Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time originally diagnosed the metaphysics of presence as Western philosophy’s bias toward the eternal presence of the “essence” of an object, denoted by the present tense of the verb “to be.” This means that ever since Plato, Western philosophy has privileged the essence or idea (Greek, eidos) as being that which truly “is” over those mundane objects which are mere representations or copies of those ideas. In Of Grammatolog y, Writing and Difference and Speech and Phenomena: An Essay on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Derrida examines how this “present” bias of Western metaphysics represses the nonpresence of what he calls “writing.” Derrida extends the traditional notion of writing by using it to designate the iterable, or repeatable, products of what Derrida calls différance. Différance is a neologism which combines the senses of the French verb différer, which means both to differ and to defer. It thus resists being simply present. Through iteration, a written mark is shot through with a future and a past that disrupts presence by deferring and differentially spacing it. Derrida analyzes these written or différantial structures at work in both Husserl’s analysis of the spoken sign in phenomenology and Ferdinand de Saussure’s analysis of the sign in semiology. As such, the sign— both written and spoken—is, to a degree, incommensurable with the metaphysics of presence inherent in a philosophical or literary Platonism that seeks to return to the more real presence of the form or idea.

In addition to what may be regarded as philosophical texts, Derrida also reads a wealth of literary and artistic texts which trace the nonpresent inscription of “writing.” He has written two pieces on James Joyce, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hearsay Yes in Joyce” and “Two Words for Joyce,” which explore Joyce’s texts as a site of nonrepresentative writing. Derrida also finds nonpresent inscription at work in the “disseminative” word-play of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry to the extent that it refuses the imposition of a preexistent sense (Dissemination), the quasi-literary trope of catachresis which writes in a rigorously non-Platonic fashion (The Margins of Philosophy), the disruption of masculine/feminine binarism through the mecha-

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nism of “antherection” found throughout Genet’s writing (Glas), the inside/outside of a work of art through Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the “parergon” or margin (Truth in Painting), and the disruption of the true “addressee” of a piece of writing on a “post-card” (The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond).

Derrida’s works have been a major influence on the field of literary theory. Literary theorists and critics such as Derek Attridge, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Margot Norris, Lorraine Weir, and Claudette Sartiliot have all explored the literary debts Derrida has said he owes literature. Derrida’s deconstructive strategies have also been adapted by cultural and political theorists such as Drucilla Cornell, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick, and Judith Butler to other texts in a non-essentialist manner.

Archives

University of California, Irvine, Critical Theory Archive; Department of Special Collections

and Archives.

Printed Sources

Attridge, Derek (ed.). Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Cornell, Drucilla. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992).

———. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Derrida, Jacques. The Archaeolog y of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, John P. Leavey Jr. (trans.), (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).

———.Dissemination, Barbara Johnson (trans.), (London: Athlone, 1981).

———.Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass (trans.), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

———.Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Rachel Bowlby and Geoffrey Bennington (trans.), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

———.Writing and Difference, Alan Bass (trans., intro.), (London: Routledge, 1978). Husserl, Edmund. L’Origine de la géométrie, Jacques Derrida (trans., intro.), (Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1962). English trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Brighton: Harvester, 1978).

Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Eve. The Epistemolog y of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

Norris, Margot. The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. James Joyce, Authorized Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

———.Joyce upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt (London: MacMillan, 1991).

Sartiliot, Claudette. Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).

Weir, Lorraine. Writing Joyce: A Semiotics of the Joyce System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

Peter Mahon

DE VALERA, EAMON (1882–1975)

Eamon Edward George Coll de Valera was born in New York City of an Irish immigrant mother and Spanish father. When his father died in 1885, de Valera was

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sent to Ireland to be raised by his uncle Edward Coll in Bruree, County Limerick. Educated at Blackrock College (1898–1901) and the Royal University in Dublin (1901–4), he taught mathematics at various colleges and universities around Dublin from 1904 to 1916. His involvement in the Gaelic League led him to join the Irish Volunteers in 1913, rising to command a detachment of Volunteers during the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. Although he was court-martialed and sentenced to death, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he was released under a general amnesty the next year. In 1917, he was elected president of Sinn Féin, which called for the establishment of an Irish Republic, and was elected to Parliament at Westminster as the representative of East Clare. De Valera also became commander in chief of the Irish Volunteers. Rearrested in 1918, he escaped from Lincoln prison in January 1919 and shortly later was elected president of Dail Eireann, the legislature of the newly proclaimed Irish Republic. As the Anglo-Irish War intensified, de Valera traveled throughout the United States raising funds. He returned to Ireland in December 1920 and took part in negotiations with the British government in early 1921. However, he did not join the delegation that traveled to London later that year and rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty the delegates signed, objecting to the oath of allegiance to the British crown and the continued partition of Ireland. When the Dail narrowly approved the Treaty in 1922, de Valera withdrew from the government and sided with the republicans in the ensuing Irish Civil War. In 1926, he split with the republicans and left Sinn Féin to form his own party, Fianna Fail. Advocating separation from Britain and an end to partition, in 1932 Fianna Fail won a majority of seats in the Dail, and de Valera became prime minister or Taoiseach (1932–48, 1951–54, 1957–59) as well as minister for external affairs. De Valera also became president of the council of the League of Nations in 1932 and president of the assembly of the League six years later. As Taoiseach, de Valera won passage of a new constitution for Ireland (1937) which deleted references to Britain and recognized the special position of the Roman Catholic Church. He negotiated another Anglo-Irish agreement (1938) to regain control of certain Irish ports, and refused to relinquish these ports during World War II, when Ireland declared its neutrality. In 1959, his eyesight failing, de Valera stepped down as Taoiseach and was elected to two terms as president of Eire (1959–73). He died in 1975.

Although de Valera considered Shakespeare his favorite author and praised the Anglo-Irish writers such as Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith (Bromage 1956, 45; Cronin 1982, 7), his own speeches, writings, and policies were most obviously influenced by romantic nationalists such as Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, Charles Gavan Duffy, and A. M. Sullivan, who were associated with the movement known as Young Ireland. In a speech on St. Patrick’s Day, 1943, that outlined his view of the Irish past and its present mission, de Valera particularly celebrated the work of the Young Irelanders, whose writings “inspired our nation and moved it spiritually as it had hardly been moved since the golden age of Irish civilization” (de Valera 1980, 466).

Archives

Franciscan Library Dun Mhuire, Killiney, County Dublin: de Valera’s correspondence and private papers. This material is currently being catalogued by the University College Dublin Archives as part of an agreement between the two institutions.

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House of Lords Record Office: The Parliamentary Archives: correspondence with David Lloyd George, 1921–22.

Public Record Office, Kew: Dublin Castle Papers. Official files and captured de Valera correspondence.

Printed Sources

Bowman, John. De Valera and the Ulster Question, 1917–1973 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

Bromage, Mary. De Valera and the March of a Nation (New York: Noonday Press, 1956). Coogan, Tim Pat. De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow (London: Hutchinson, 1993). Cronin, Anthony. Heritage Now: Irish Literature in English (New York: St. Martins Press,

1982).

de Valera, Eamon. Speeches and Statements of Eamon de Valera 1917–73, Maurice Moynihan (ed.), (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1980).

Dwyer, T. Ryle. De Valera: The Man and the Myths (Swords: Poolbeg, 1991).

Longford, Frank Pakenham, Earl of, and Thomas O’Neill. Eamon de Valera (London: Hutchinson, 1970).

O’Carroll, J. P., and J. A. Murphy (eds.). De Valera and His Times (Cork: Cork University Press, 1986).

Travers, Pauric. Eamon de Valera (Dundalk: Dundalgan, 1994).

Padraic Kennedy

DEWEY, JOHN (1859–1952)

Born in Burlington, Vermont, to Archibald S. Dewey, a Civil War veteran, and Lucina A. Rich, John was the oldest of three surviving sons. He enjoyed the outdoors. His mother, a strong Calvinist, encouraged him to join the First Congregational Church at the age of 11. His father gave him a deep interest in British literature and urged him to read widely. Faculty members of the University of Vermont were often guests in Dewey’s home. Dewey graduated in 1879. At the university Dewey read Thomas H. Huxley’s Lessons in Elementary Physiolog y and studied with G. H. Perkins, an evolutionist. He also read Scottish moral realism and Hegelianism with H.A.P. Torrey, whose influence was significant. Elements of Hegel and Darwin remained with Dewey throughout his life. Naturalism and historicism gradually replaced Christianity theology in his thought, but he maintained a life-time commitment of reformism from Protestantism.

In 1884 Dewey graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a Ph.D. in philosophy. George Sylvester Morris, an Hegelianist, and G. Stanley Hall, a Darwinian psychologist, significantly influenced Dewey at Hopkins. After teaching philosophy for 10 years, by 1894 Dewey established a laboratory school at the University of Chicago. He also stopped attending church. After a dispute with university authorities, Dewey went to Columbia in 1904. He retired in 1930. He remained active in political reforms (often a form of Protestant uplift) and writing until his death.

He once observed that “the forces that have influenced me have come from persons and from situations more than from books—not that I have not, I hope, learned a great deal from philosophical writings, but that what I have learned from them has been technical in comparison with what I have been forced to think upon and about because of some experience in which I found myself entangled.” Because

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of that thought, Dewey celebrated the Vermont of his youth. “I shall never cease to be grateful that I was born at a time and a place where the earlier ideal of liberty and the self-governing community of citizens still sufficiently prevailed so that I unconsciously imbibed a sense of its meaning.”

His significant influences are notable in three areas. Dewey was a founder of progressive education wherein the child’s interests form the core of the educational program. The School and Society (1899) was his major educational contribution.

Dewey was a reformer. Instrumentalism, his version of pragmatism, was reform in behalf of democracy. People should be able to make individual choices, and, because they live in an industrial and urban context, government, as a balancing presence, must protect the individual as expressed in The Public and Its Problems (1927).

Dewey’s third area of influence was as an academic philosopher. Dewey modified his Hegelianism but he was never completely divorced from German idealism. Darwinian naturalism with its appeal of scientific certainty meant that Dewey grounded his inquiry in the biological nature of the human organism. Dewey accepted the methodologies and results of experimental science. As inherited from pre-Darwinian philosophy and science, teleology was highly misleading. Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), and The Quest For Certainty (1929) were Dewey’s major publications.

Archives

Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

Printed Sources

Coughlan, Neil. Young John Dewey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). Explains Hegel’s impact on Dewey’s thought.

Dewey, John. The Collected Works of John Dewey, 37 vols., Jo Ann Boydston (chief ed.), (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–91).

Dykhuizen, George. The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975).

Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). The best detailed account of Dewey’s activities as a philosopher and citizen.

Donald K. Pickens

DICKEY, JAMES (1923–1997)

James Dickey was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He attended Clemson University but during his first semester left to join the Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1946. He began writing and publishing poems during officer training. After the war, Dickey completed his B.A. (1949) and M.A. (1950) in English at Vanderbilt University. During his first teaching job, Dickey was recalled to active duty in the Korean War. After his discharge, Dickey received a Sewanee Review fellowship that enabled him to move to Europe for a year to write poetry. Upon his return, Dickey accepted a teaching position at the University of Florida, but resigned in 1956 after a controversial poetry reading. Dickey became an advertising copywriter for a succession of agencies where he spent equal time writing narrative poetry characterized by myth, violence, fearful cruelty, and compassion. He published his first book-length collection of poems, Into the Stone, in 1960. A Guggenheim fellowship allowed him to quit

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advertising to work on his third book, Helmets (1964). The publication of Buckdancer’s Choice (1965) brought Dickey his first major recognition, the National Book Award in poetry in 1966, and a two-year appointment as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. His self-described “barnstorming for poetry” across the country brought him greater notoriety as he promoted both poetry and himself. From 1969 until his death, Dickey taught poetry at the University of South Carolina. In the 1970s and 1980s, Dickey published books of poetry, his popular novel Deliverance, the autobiographical Self-Interviews, and his second novel, Alnilam. His collected poems, essays, and a third novel, To the White Sea, appeared in the early 1990s.

Dickey acknowledged literary influences on him during various stages of his writing career. He culled bits of philosophy from different poets and writers, absorbing and incorporating them into his own work. Dickey counted the poets Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as early influences. George Barker’s sense of style, Kenneth Patchen’s attitude, W. S. Graham’s method and diction, Rainer Rilke’s insight and attitude, Stephen Spender’s idealism, Randall Jarrell’s humanistic feeling of compassion, and Robert Penn Warren’s violence were qualities he emulated (Dickey 1970, 27–28, 34). He got creative stimulation from philosopher Heraclitus’s evocative images and parables, and admired James Agee’s verbal sensibility (Dickey 1970, 69, 75). Dickey cited Thomas Hardy’s inventiveness with forms and T. S. Eliot’s use of the Osiris myth as influences on his first book (Dickey 1970, 84–85). In a letter to his wife in 1953, Dickey said he was striving for “fast, athletic, imaginative, and muscular vigor that I want to identify as my particular kind of writing.” Dickey taught himself to read French and wrote, “the French writers have done me much good . . . I want to [develop] the sense of immediacy in poetry, the controlled spontaneity that I am convinced my writing should have . . . ” (Sept. 25, 1954, in Dickey 2003, 226-28). A voracious reader of writers he disliked as well as admired, Dickey purchased a breadth of books on existential philosophy (Albert Camus, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche), mythology and primitive religion, literary biographies (Agee, Warren, Roethke), apocalyptic poetry, and French poetry ( Jules Superveille, Pierre Reverdy, André Frenaud, René Guy Cadon).

Archives

Special Collections Department, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C. Dickey’s 18,000-volume personal library.

Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga. Notebooks and correspondence (published 1996 and 1999).

University Archives, John West Campus Library and Conference Center, Washington University, Clayton, Mo. Unpublished essays and addresses.

Printed Sources

Calhoun, Richard J., and Robert W. Hill. James Dickey (Boston: Twayne, 1983).

Dickey, Christopher. Summer of Deliverance; a Memoir of Father and Son (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

Dickey, James. The One Voice of James Dickey: His Letters and Life, 1942-1969. Gordon van Ness (ed.), (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003).

Dickey, James. Self-Interviews. Recorded and edited by Barbara and James Reiss (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970).

Susan Hamburger

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Dietrich, Marlene

DIETRICH, MARLENE (1901–1992)

Marlene Dietrich was born as Marie Magdalene Dietrich in Schöneberg, near Berlin, the daughter of police lieutenant Louis Dietrich, who died in 1907. When her mother, Josephine Felsing, remarried, Marie acquired the surname of her stepfather, army officer Eduard von Losch. About this time she contracted “Marie Magdalene” to “Marlene.” She and her older sister Elisabeth, tutored at home by their mother and governesses, were each fluent in both French and English by the age of 12. Her mother also fostered her talent for voice, piano, and violin, hiring private teachers for the two instruments in 1915. After Colonel von Losch was killed in World War I, Frau von Losch urged Marlene toward a career as a concert violinist. Marlene moved from Berlin to Weimar in 1919 to continue her violin studies. There she met Alma Mahler-Gropius and immersed herself in the Bauhaus culture and Gustav Mahler’s legacy. Her diligent concentration on her instrument gained her admission to the prestigious Hochschule für Musik in Berlin in 1921. She practiced so hard that she did severe neurological damage to her left wrist and had to give the violin up in 1922.

Swallowing her bitter disappointment, and idolizing Henny Porten, she determined to become an actress instead. To spare her disapproving mother’s feelings, she changed her surname back to “Dietrich.” The prominent producer/director Max Reinhardt accepted her into his Deutsche Theaterschule on her second attempt, and by the end of 1922 she was playing small roles in his repertory productions of several plays, including Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Her success on stage came to the attention of Georg Jacoby, who directed her in her first film, Der kleine Napoleon, in 1923. With the release of Der blaue Engel in 1930, she was famous throughout Germany. Josef von Sternberg, the director of that film, brought her to America in 1930, directed her in Morocco, released The Blue Angel, and directed her in five more films. Many critics accused von Sternberg of being her Svengali, but her outspoken independence soon proved them wrong. When he unilaterally ended their professional relationship in 1935, her stardom as both actress and singer was secure. His career never again reached such heights, but she later triumphed in Destry Rides Again, Stage Fright, Witness for the Prosecution, Judgment at Nuremberg, and on nightclub stages around the world.

Dietrich was familiar with German drama from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Bertolt Brecht and beyond. She was friends with and knew the works of Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Noël Coward,

Jean Cocteau, Alfred Kerr, Kenneth Tynan, André Malraux, and Carl Zuckmayer. She knew many poems of Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke by heart.

Archives

In 1993 Dietrich’s entire estate, including about 300,000 leaves of papers and correspondence and about 15,000 photographs, was moved to Berlin to create the permanent Marlene Dietrich Collection at the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek.

Printed Sources

Bach, Steven. Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (New York: Morrow, 1992; Da Capo, 2000). Dickens, Homer. The Complete Films of Marlene Dietrich (New York: Carol, 1992).

Dietrich, Marlene. Ich bin, Gott sei Dank, Berlinerin (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1987), trans. as Marlene by Salvator Attanasio (New York: Grove, 1989).

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Frewin, Leslie. Dietrich: The Story of a Star (New York: Stein and Day, 1967). Higham, Charles. Marlene: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (New York: Norton, 1977).

Morley, Sheridan. Marlene Dietrich (London: Elm Tree, 1976; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977).

O’Connor, Patrick. Dietrich: Style and Substance (New York: Dutton, 1991). Riva, Maria. Marlene Dietrich: By Her Daughter (New York: Knopf, 1993). Silver, Charles. Marlene Dietrich (New York: Pyramid, 1974).

Spoto, Donald. Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

Eric v.d. Luft

DIMAGGIO, JOSEPH PAUL (1914–1999)

Joe DiMaggio was born in Martinez, California. The eighth of nine children born to Sicilian immigrants Giuseppe and Rosalie DiMaggio, the young DiMaggio grew up in the North Beach section of San Francisco, California. Days for DiMaggio and his immediate circle of friends were spent playing hooky, hanging out at the docks, fishing off the pier, and playing poker for pennies. The classroom was not DiMaggio’s favorite place to be, with childhood friend Frank Venezia recalling DiMaggio’s shyness and the reclusiveness of Giuseppe and Rosalie, who spoke only Italian. Relatively quickly, DiMaggio distinguished himself in the neighborhood as a ballplayer, finding in baseball something he could do well and earn a living playing, eventually capping his West Coast career with a season for the San Francisco Seals. In the early years of DiMaggio’s thirteen seasons in center field for the New York Yankees, Lefty Gomez recalls a shy DiMaggio who took a small radio on a two-week road trip and listened to big-band music and quiz shows like Dr. IQ, and read the sports pages. Throughout the course of his career in Yankee pinstripes, DiMaggio remained a private figure while contributing to nine World Series titles, winning three American League Most Valuable Player awards and two batting titles, and serving for two years in the U.S. Army. DiMaggio’s record for hitting safely in 56 consecutive games in the 1941 season stands today. DiMaggio’s postYankee years were marked by his brief marriage to Marilyn Monroe, broadcasting and coaching efforts for the Oakland As, spokesman roles for Mr. Coffee products and Bowery Savings Bank, and recognition until his death as baseball’s greatest living player.

Throughout most of his playing career, DiMaggio was a figure brought to life for fans through the play-by-play of radio broadcasters and the words of sports writers. For his steady, fabled presence on the field and regular appearances at Toots Shor’s in New York, DiMaggio remained an intensely private person. During his years as a Yankee, DiMaggio studied the game itself. Not an avid reader, DiMaggio is reputed to have read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and had his favorite sports columnists, including Looie Effrat from the New York Times, Jimmy Cannon, Bill Corum, Grantland Rice, Red Smith, and Arthur Daley. In addition to being a fan of their writing style, DiMaggio enjoyed their relaxed company and off-the-record confidences at Toots Shor’s. Columnist and friend Walter Winchell took DiMaggio out for late drives listening to the police scanner. Jackie Gleason made DiMaggio laugh, and fights at Madison Square Garden stoked his competitive spirit. DiMaggio also kept his eye on Wednesdays when the latest issue of Superman comics appeared on the stands, often asking others, like Lefty Gomez,

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to buy the comic book for him. DiMaggio’s brief marriage to Marilyn Monroe exposed him to Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, Mickey Spillane, and Jules Verne. Monroe also kept the Bible, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln, vols. 1–6, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s

Essays, and Sigmund Freud’s Psycholog y of Everyday Life on her shelves, though it is not known whether DiMaggio read the books. Throughout his entire life, including his time with Marilyn Monroe, DiMaggio remained a fan of movie and television westerns. Several sources cite the post-Yankee DiMaggio’s favorite book as being Thomas J. Stanley and William Danko’s The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy. In his later years, DiMaggio educated himself by devouring newspapers, including the editorial pages, and nurturing an addiction to 24-hour news, including CNN, CNBC, and C-Span. The mystique of DiMaggio carried over to the realm of stories with Ernest Hemingway’s Santiago telling the boy he would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing, while Simon and Garfunkle’s 1968 “Mrs. Robinson” asked “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio,” searching for lost heroes.

Archives

Major League Baseball archives, New York, New York.

Player Clipping Files, National Baseball Library, Cooperstown, New York.

Printed Sources

Allen, Maury. Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1975).

Cramer, Richard Ben. Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Johnson, Dick, and Glenn Stout. DiMaggio, An Illustrated Life (New York: Walker and Com-

pany, 1995).

Moore, Jack B. A Bio-bibliograph. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986).

———. Joe DiMaggio: Baseball’s Yankee Clipper (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986).

Whittingham, Richard (ed.). The DiMaggio Albums: Selections From Public and Private Collections Celebrating the Baseball Career of Joe DiMaggio (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989).

Devon Niebling

DISNEY, WALTER ELIAS (1901–1966)

Walt Disney was a hard-working midwesterner born in Chicago without money or advantages who created an unmatched American entertainment empire. Walt Disney found success due to his ability to innovate, to sense what the public would like, and to pursue his dreams with workaholic intensity. Unlike many entrepreneurs for whom amassing wealth is the end goal, Disney’s goal was the creation of entertainment for families and, ultimately, the bettering of life through entertainment. From cartoons to live-action films to educational nature documentaries, Disney continually moved into new entertainment areas, including amusement parks and planned communities of the future. For a political conservative, Disney’s interest in innovation was remarkable. He was the first to work with storyboards (now a standard feature film tool) and the first to match sound with animation. He

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embraced Technicolor and nearly every other technological innovation he felt could make his entertainment products better. He was the first film mogul to embrace television. In fact, Disney was so linked to innovation that it was long rumored that Disney had asked that his body be frozen upon death so that if future science progressed, he might be unfrozen and revived. While false, the rumor shows the intense originality and spirit of innovation associated in the public mind with Disney by the time of his death. His President’s Medal of Freedom (1964) citation read “Artist and impresario, in the course of entertaining an age, he has created an American folklore.” Disney changed the face of American popular culture. This midwestern “go-getter” who moved to Los Angeles with just $40 in his pocket has had a lasting impact on the U.S. entertainment industry. Disney’s dual import as entrepreneur and entertainer is reflected in the fact that when Time Magazine recognized the turn of the century by naming in 2001 the top 100 leaders of the past century, Walt Disney’s name appeared among the top ten entertainment leaders as well as among the top ten “Builders and Titans,” something no other entry achieved. In 2002, the company he founded was the world’s second-largest media company.

Taught to read by his mother, Disney was an average student, perhaps because he held a variety of jobs outside of school. He graduated from Benton School, Kansas City, in 1917 and enrolled that year in McKinley High School in Chicago upon his family’s return to Chicago. He studied anatomy, pen technique, and cartooning three nights a week at the Chicago Art Institute. However, after only one year of high school, Disney joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps in November 1918 as World War I concluded and never returned to high school.

According to biographer Bob Thomas, Disney read everything by Mark Twain, whose Missouri childhood was similar to his own. Disney was fascinated by the success stories of Horatio Alger. Disney enjoyed the storytelling of Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens. Disney was keenly influenced by his early twentieth-century childhood in his literary tastes. His entertainment empire’s products reflect that taste, with films based on late nineteenth-century literature, including Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as well as folk and fairy tales such as “Snow White” and “Cinderella.” He used American folklore as well, producing films like “Davy Crockett.” Disney sought all literary materials that could be transformed into film and television shows that would serve the public’s need for family entertainment. Disney’s 1946 film Song of the South was based on the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, which he had enjoyed since childhood. Disney and his staff plumbed literature that might be successfully adapted to film and television, always with family entertainment and good storytelling the high priorities. For example, Mary Poppins (1964) had its beginnings twenty years earlier when Disney saw the book on his daughter’s bedside table, and after reading it himself adapted the collection of stories about a nanny to film. All who knew him agree Disney was most keenly skilled not in art and animation but in story-editing and storytelling. The phrase “Disney version” has come to mean in popular culture the “cleaned up” version of a onceviolent fairy tale or other story, made fit by the Disney sensibility for families to hear, rather than the unvarnished violence, crude humor, or risqué materials created by other entertainment firms.

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