Dictionary of Literary Influences

Maslow, Abraham Harold

and Slovak cultural figures of the nineteenth century who had been adherents of the German philosopher: Czech linguists Josef Dobrovsky´ and Josef Jungmann, historian Frantisˇek Palacky´, journalist Karel Havlícˇek, and Slovak poet Ján Kollár. Masaryk also sought to balance his idealism with a strong measure of Enlightenment skepticism and rationality. He cited David Hume, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill as particularly important for the development of his “realist” politics, a program that addressed the immediate needs of the people while also aiming for a lofty, humanitarian goal. Masaryk’s skepticism and emphasis on rationality also shaped his views of religion. He revered the heritage of the Czech Reformation and its leaders Jan Hus and Jan Amos Komensky´, and he followed Palacky´’s interpretation that Protestant faith was at the core of Czech national identity. He maintained that religious faith was necessary for the responsible, ethical life in the modern era, and he often cited the teachings of Jesus Christ. He summarized his guiding philosophy as president as “Christ, not Caesar.”

Archives

Archive of the T. G. Masaryk Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic: Masaryk Archive. Presidential and personal papers, papers relating to Masaryk’s efforts in exile during World War I, manuscripts of articles and books, collections of Masaryk’s wife, Charlotte, and their children: Herbert, Alice, Olga, and Jan.

Printed Sources

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Capek, Karel. Talks with T. G. Masaryk (North Haven, Conn.: Catbird Press, 1995). Hanak, Harry (ed.). T. G. Masaryk (1850–1937), vol. I, Statesman and Cultural Force (New

York: St. Martins, 1990).

Pynsent, Robert (ed.). T. G. Masaryk (1850–1937), vol. II, Thinker and Critic (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989).

Skilling, H. Gordon. T. G. Masaryk: Against the Current, 1882–1914 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

Szporluk, Roman. The Political Thought of Thomas G. Masaryk (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1981).

Winters, Stanley (ed.). T. G. Masaryk (1850–1937), vol. III, Thinker and Politician (London: Macmillan, 1990).

Bruce R. Berglund

MASLOW, ABRAHAM HAROLD (1908–1970)

Abraham Maslow, regarded as the founder of humanistic psychology, was born in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of seven children of uneducated Jewish immigrants from Russia. He earned degrees in psychology at the University of Wisconsin: his B.A. in 1930, his M.A. in 1931, and his Ph.D. in 1934. Professor Harry Harlow, who supervised Maslow’s dissertation, was at the time researching behavior in baby rhesus monkeys. Maslow subsequently worked as a professor at Brooklyn College (1937–51) and at Brandeis University (1951–61).

Several important mentors influenced Maslow including Erich Fromm, Kurt Koffka, Karen Horney, and Alfred Adler. Maslow advanced his theory of human motivation based on the study of two of his mentors, anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer.

Maslow’s relationship with Wertheimer was especially influential. Wertheimer’s lecture entitled “Being and Doing” prompted Maslow to study Eastern philosophy.

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Wertheimer also emphasized the role of “values” in human life, something that would also dominate Maslow’s own theories. One Wertheimer article, “Some Problems in the Theory of Ethics,” condemned the relativist views of the period. In “A Story of Three Days,” Wertheimer criticized the emphasis by many psychologists on the study of mental illness, advocating instead that they direct more attention toward the study of the mental health of individuals. In this article, Wertheimer also alluded to what Maslow would ultimately label as “peak-experiences.”

The theories that Maslow advanced differed dramatically from others since they did focus upon the mental health, the human strengths, and upon the potential of the individual. Maslow’s seminal work, Motivation and Personality (1954), expanded his arguments by depicting a “hierarchy of needs,” thus shifting the focus of motivation theory away from the deprivation of a person and toward the gratification of the individual. This work presented a new humanistic model consisting of five broad categories of human needs, in ascending order: physiological needs, safety and security needs, social or love needs, esteem needs, and finally self-actualization needs. Maslow argued that the gratification of each successive need led to the activation of the next level in the hierarchy.

On June 8, 1970, Abraham Harold Maslow died of a massive heart attack.

Archives

Maslow, Abraham, Papers. Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio. 65 linear feet. Materials in the collection date between 1929 and 1972 and include class notes, manuscripts, diaries, annotated books, and audiotapes. Topics of correspondence include self-actualization; peak experiences; T-Groups; Eupsuchian Philosophy; humanists; the Esalen Institute; and work with Blackfoot Indians.

Dreikurs, Rudolf, Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. Correspondence with Abraham Maslow.

Wertheimer, Max, Papers. New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. 9 cartons. Letters (1902–43) to Wertheimer from European colleagues relating to his work in Gestalt psychology; manuscripts. of his lectures and writings including Productive Thinking (1945); notes, notebooks, and miscellaneous papers.

Printed Sources

Hoffman, Edward. The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1988). A well-written book that uses many sources including diaries, notes, writings, and correspondence. This work also includes an excellent bibliography.

——— (ed.). Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996).

Maslow, Abraham H. Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1954). Maslow’s epochal work that advanced his psychological theory of a “hierarchy of needs” and shifted the study of psychology toward a humanistic direction.

Wertheimer, Max. Productive Thinking, English ed. (New York: Harper, 1959).

———.“Some Problems in the Theory of Ethics,” Social Research 2 (1935), 353–67. Reprinted in Mary Henle (ed.), Documents of Gestalt Psycholog y (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961).

———.“A Story of Three Days.” In R. N. Anshen (ed.), Freedom: Its Meaning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940). Reprinted in Mary Henle (ed.), Documents of Gestalt Psycholog y (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961).

Robert O. Marlin IV

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Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich

MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH (1893–1930)

Vladimir Mayakovsky was born and lived in Bagdadi (now Mayakovsky), Georgia, until 1906 when his family moved to Moscow. A self-admitted poor student, Mayakovsky was thrown out of several schools as a boy. In his autobiography “I, Myself,” Mayakovsky explained that he received his haphazard education from his mother and older sisters (Mayakovsky 1978, 29). Before the age of 16, Mayakovsky had been arrested three times for bolshevik agitation and spent more than six months in prison, most of it in solitary confinement. After his release, Mayakovsky attended the Moscow Institute for the Study of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he met the modernist poet and painter David Burlyuk. Having persuaded Mayakovsky to pursue poetry over painting, Burlyuk was a decisive influence in his life and Mayakovsky called him “my true teacher” (Mayakovsky 1978, 38). In his short lifetime, Mayakovsky produced several volumes of lyrical poetry and political verse, four narrative poems, graphic art for advertising, propaganda slogans, thirteen film scenarios, and two plays. Thus, although Mayakovsky began his career as a member of the cubist movement in Russian painting in 1911, he is remembered today as an innovative poet, playwright, and one of the founding members of Russian futurism.

In his autobiography, Mayakovsky boasted that the second book he ever read was Don Quixote; he also claimed to have read Jules Verne at an early age (Mayakovsky 1978, 30). Despite these early literary adventures, Mayakovsky admitted that he read little fiction growing up; he preferred the writings of G. W. F. Hegel and especially Marx (Mayakovsky 1978, 33). During his solitary confinement in prison, he finally read Lord Byron, William Shakespeare, and Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Mayakovsky 1978, 35). Then he discovered his contemporaries the Russian symbolists and read Andrey Bely and Konstantin Balmont (Mayakovsky 1978, 34). He was inspired by the formal innovation of the symbolists, and tried his hand at applying their methods to his own subject matter. These verses written in prison in 1909 were his first attempts at poetry. Edward Brown suggests that Mayakovsky’s debt to Bely can be seen in his mature verse as well, especially in his frequent use of sun imagery and unconventional stanzaic structure, based on a system of emotional emphasis that first appeared in Bely’s Gold on Azure (Brown 1973, 38). Soviet scholarship prefers to trace Mayakovsky’s roots to the poetry of Nikolai Nekrasov and Gavrila Derzhavin. Kozhinov claims that Nekrasov and Derzhavin provide the model for Mayakovsky’s mixing of speech styles, shocking imagery, and preoccupation with the common cause (Kozhinov 1976, 74). The hallmarks of Mayakovsky’s style and the reasons for his lasting influence—his radical rhymes, his offbeat metaphors, and his unconventional diction—are his own brilliant innovations.

Archives

Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) in Moscow.

The Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow.

Printed Sources

Brown, Edward J. Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). Contains an excellent bibliography.

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Jakobson, Roman. “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets.” In Major Soviet Authors: Essays in Criticism, E. J. Brown (ed. and trans.), (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

Katsis, L. F. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Poet v intellektual’nom kontekste epoxi (Moscow: Yazyki russkoi kultury, 2000).

Kozhinov, Vadim. “Mayakovsky and Russian Classical Literature.” In Vladimir Mayakovsky: Innovator, Alex Miller (trans.), (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).

Mayakovsky, V. V. “Ia sam” (“I, Myself”). In Sochineniia v trekh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1978). A short autobiography.

Shklovsky, Viktor. Mayakovsky and His Circle, Lily Feiler (ed. and trans.), (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1972).

Terras, Victor. Vladimir Mayakovsky (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983).

Erika Haber

MCLUHAN, HERBERT MARSHALL (1911–1980)

Marshall McLuhan, born at Edmonton Alberta, Canada, spent his youth in Winnipeg, Manitoba. After graduating from the University of Manitoba (B.A., 1933; M.A. 1934) he received a doctorate in English literature from Cambridge University (1943). His thesis involved a review of the trivium from its classical beginnings through to the early Renaissance as a way of interpreting the works of Thomas Nashe. Raised as a “loose” Protestant—he attended Baptist, Methodist, and Anglican Churches in Winnipeg—later, heavily influenced by the writings of G. K. Chesterton, he formally converted to Roman Catholicism in 1937. Throughout his doctoral studies and later career he read extensively in the antiNicene fathers and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. McLuhan, who became the image of media studies in the 1960s and early 1970s, emerged again in the 1990s when Wired magazine adopted him as their saint, one of the prime figures anticipating the growth of digiculture. From the perspective of literary history and history of the arts, McLuhan is the main conduit by which the traditions from Egypt and the Near East through Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages to the symbolistes and the radical avant-garde were implicated in the prehistory of cyberculture.

The major influences on McLuhan’s program involved the literature on classical education in grammar, logic, and rhetoric (particularly Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca), Ovid and the Ovidian tradition, the Menippean satirists (Lucian, Apuleius, Varro), and their Renaissance and neo-Augustan successors (Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, François Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne). His thesis, soon to be published by Gingko Press (Thomas Nashe and the Learning of His Time), is the most extensive account of the classical influences and secondary sources. His first and earliest literary interests were in the Renaissance period, in which he had extensive knowledge of the canon of Elizabethan and Tudor drama. His particular interests were Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, the latter particularly as a precursor of James Joyce. His Renaissance interests were by no means limited to English drama. Francis Bacon, Michel Montaigne, and Blaise Pascal were crucial figures in the shaping of his complex, ambivalent, satiric essay style. The centrality of these issues in his writings can be seen in his first recognized publication, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), which opens with his argument being supported by a scene from Shakespeare’s King Lear and

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concludes with the unfolding argument about the rise and fall of print being related to Pope’s The Dunciad.

Contemporary literature, art, and architecture were primary influences on all of his works. The most central figures were Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, whom he viewed as Menippean satirists, along with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the major French symbolistes, particularly Stephane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules LaForgue, Charles Baudelaire, and Paul Valéry. Joyce is one of the most cited writers in all of his works and provides virtually the whole grounding for his essai concrete, War and Peace in the Global Village. Far more than any commentary, McLuhan’s own writings provide insight into his literary and artistic interests, especially From Cliche to Archetype and The Vanishing Point. On the artistic side, it is important to note that his first work, The Mechanical Bride, adopted its title from Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass and that Sigfreid Giedion, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Lewis Mumford were important influences both in the writing and the presentation of his first essai concrete.

The still not fully recognized contribution of McLuhan to discourse about culture, communication, and technology is that he transmitted both a long-range and a short-range history to the evolution and understanding of electronic and digital media and their impact on traditional oral, written, and print culture. The major discussions of these aspects of McLuhan are to be found in the books listed below.

Archives

The Marshall McLuhan collection in the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa. Contains extensive notes and correspondence relating to literary and personal sources as well as some of McLuhan’s course materials for his graduate and undergraduate English courses.

Printed Sources

Cavell, Richard. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

Gordon, Terence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (Toronto: Stoddart, 1997). Kroker, Arthur. Technolog y and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant (Montreal: New

World Perspectives, 1984).

Languirand, Jacques. De McLuhan à Pythagore (Ottawa: Ferron éditeur, 1972).

McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium and the Light, Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (eds.), (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999).

Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (Toronto: Random House, 1989).

Moos, Michael A. (ed.). Marshall McLuhan Essays: Media Research: Technolog y, Art, Communication (Amsterdam: G & B Arts, 1997).

Stearn, Gerald (ed.). McLuhan Hot & Cool: A Critical Symposium (New York: Dial, 1977). Theall, Donald. The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan (Montreal:

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971).

Theall, Donald (with E. S. Carpenter). The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2001).

Toye, William. “Commentaries and Annotations.” In The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (eds.), (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Zingrone, Frank, and Eric McLuhan (eds.). Essential Marshall McLuhan (Toronto: Anansi, 1995).

Donald F. Theall

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McPherson, Aimee Semple

MCPHERSON, AIMEE SEMPLE (1890–1944)

McPherson, the first major female revivalist in the United States, was born near Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada, to James and Minnie Kennedy. Her father was a Methodist, and her mother was active in the Salvation Army. As a result, Aimee was early exposed to her father’s traditional piety and her mother’s activist theology. As a student at the Ingersoll Collegiate High School (1905–8), Aimee was introduced to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which shook her Christian belief. Her faith was later restored, largely as a result of the sermons of Robert Semple, a young Pentecostal evangelist. Aimee married Semple and traveled with him as a missionary to China, but he died soon afterward. Aimee relocated to the United States, married Harold McPherson, and settled in Providence, Rhode Island. She began work as an itinerant evangelist, eventually divorced her husband, and moved to Los Angeles with her mother in 1918. McPherson continued her revivals, built the spacious Angelus Temple to accommodate them, and acquired a radio station. She emphasized the “foursquare gospel”—regeneration, divine healing, the Second Coming of Christ, and the baptism of the Holy Ghost (Thomas 1970, 20)—and she named her organization the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. In 1926, she disappeared from a California beach, reemerging two months later in Arizona and claiming that she had been kidnapped. Her disappearance was alleged by many to have been a lover’s tryst, however, and the scandal cast a shadow over the remainder of her career. She died of an apparent accidental overdose of a prescribed sedative in 1944.

Evidence of McPherson’s early literary influences is scant, but she apparently owed much of her resourcefulness and resolve to lessons that she learned from Alice Caldwell Hagen’s childhood story, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Blumhofer 1993, 19). McPherson’s most significant literary influence, however, was the Bible, and its narratives informed her outlook on the world. At the age of five, she could recite whole chapters of biblical books (Thomas 1970, 3). This sheltered outlook received a severe shock when she encountered the theory of evolution in her high school textbook, High School Physical Geography. In an attempt to discover the truth about God’s existence, McPherson delved into the works of such thinkers as Voltaire, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine, and Charles Darwin, and she gained a command of contemporary science (Epstein 1993, 31). Eventually, McPherson rejected Darwinism, and the Bible again became her primary intellectual and literary reference. In fact, she derived her “foursquare gospel” in part from the visions in the biblical book of Ezekiel (Blumhofer 1993, 190–92). In a course entitled “Foursquare Fundamentals” that McPherson taught at her L. I. F. E. Bible college, she also cited John Wesley, Dwight L. Moody, and Albert Benjamin Simpson, a Canadian evangelist who emphasized a “Fourfold Gospel,” as individuals whose work informed her beliefs (Epstein 1993, 432–33).

Archives

Heritage Department, International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Los Angeles, Calif. McPherson left no private papers or correspondence and these materials are related to her career.

Printed Sources

Bahr, Robert. Least of All Saints: The Story of Aimee Semple McPherson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979).

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Blumhofer, Edith L. Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1993).

Epstein, Daniel Mark. Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993).

Thomas, Lately. Storming Heaven: The Lives and Turmoils of Minnie Kennedy and Aimee Semple McPherson (New York: William Morrow, 1970).

———. The Vanishing Evangelist: The Aimee Semple McPherson Kidnaping Affair (New York: Viking, 1959).

Scott Lupo

MEAD, MARGARET (1901–1978)

Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Edward Sherwood Mead and Emily Fogg Mead, were both academics and encouraged their oldest daughter’s intellectual questions. Her paternal grandmother, Martha Ramsey Mead, was her first teacher and schooled her at home until she was eight. Mead’s formal education was interspersed with years of home schooling and permission from her parents to come and go from classes as she pleased. Margaret was attracted to a religious life, even though her family was not. She explored several denominations before settling on the Episcopal faith at age 11. In 1919 she attended her father’s alma mater, DePauw College in Indiana, intent on becoming a writer. She transferred to Barnard where she found her niche in the psychology department. After graduating with a B.A. from Barnard in 1923, Mead completed an M.A. in psychology 1924 and a doctorate in anthropology in 1929 at Columbia, studying with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. Mead’s first field trip was to Samoa where her work on adolescent girls resulted in her book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). A tireless researcher, Mead continued to study the peoples of the Pacific Islands. Her base throughout her life was as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Later in life Mead turned to studies on contemporary life that focused on diet, mental health, and technology. Mead married three times. With Gregory Bateson, her third husband, she developed ethnographic film techniques still considered important. Mead’s legacy is her cross cultural work which focuses on keen observations of places and people, especially adolescents and children.

In an essay included in A History of Psycholog y in Autobiography, vol. VI (1974), Mead describes her reading practices. As a young girl, Mead read poetry and novels, children’s books of her grandmother’s generation and plays of her mother’s liking. She also read classical mythology and all of Charles Dickens. In college psychology Mead studied the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, whose theories affected her anthropological work. Edward Sapir’s book Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921) was significant to Mead and she passed it on to her daughter Catherine when she left for college. Prior to her fieldwork in Samoa, she read everything she could find on the Pacific Islands including Bronislaw Malinowski’s book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Margaret Mead enjoyed long relationships with many colleagues whose work influenced her throughout her life. The manuscript of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) arrived while Mead was in the field in New Guinea. She read Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) as an undergraduate. Scholars who developed tests, such as Jean Piaget and Erik Erickson, influenced the way Mead constructed her field experiments.

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Theodora Mead Abel’s cross-cultural work on Rorschachs “enlivened” her own studies of Pacific cultures. Interdisciplinary reading was vital to Mead’s work and she mourned the lack of it in younger colleagues.

Archives

Margaret Mead Administrative Correspondence, Interviews (1925–80), American Museum of Natural History, New York, N.Y.

Margaret Mead Archives, Pacific Ethnographic Archives, 1838–1987 (bulk 1911–78), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 1,800 boxes of diaries, correspondence, manuscripts, and photographs, over 500 films, over 1,000 recordings.

Printed Sources

Bateson, Mary Catherine. With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1984).

Howard, Jane. Margaret Mead: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

Mead, Margaret. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1972).

———. “Margaret Mead.” In Gardner Lindzey (ed.), A History of Psycholog y in Anthropolog y, vol. 6 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1974).

Millie Jackson

MEIR, GOLDA (1898–1978)

Golda Mabovitch, the prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1973, was born in Kiev, Russia. Due to hardship and extreme poverty, her family immigrated to the United States in 1906 and settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Following in the footsteps of her sister Sheyna, nine years her senior, she joined the Socialist-Zionist Poale Zion in 1915. She enrolled in the Milwaukee Normal School and then the Teachers’ Training College in 1916. A year later she married Morris Myerson, a sign painter, who introduced her to classical music, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The young couple left for Palestine in 1921, settling first in Kibbutz Merhavia and then moving to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where they started a family—a son, Menachem, was born in 1924 and a daughter, Sarah, was born in 1926. In 1928 Meir embarked on a lifelong political career as she joined the Women’s Labor Union. In 1934, she became a member of the executive committee of the Israel Labor Union and later headed its political department. During the 1940s, as the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, she actively negotiated concessions with the British mandatory government. Upon the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Meir was appointed the first ambassador to Moscow, a position she held until April 1949. Later that year, as a new member of the Israeli Parliament, she became the minister of labor. From 1956 to 1965, Meir served as the first female foreign minister of Israel, developing new relationships between Israel and various African, Asian, and Latin American countries and gaining acclaim worldwide. On retirement from the foreign ministry, she accepted the post of the secretary general of the Labor Party. In 1969 after the sudden death of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Meir became the world’s second female prime minister after Madame Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka. She resigned in 1974, deeply distraught by the conclusions of the Agranant Inquiry Commission, ruling that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Meir’s gov-

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ernment had erred in assessing the imminent danger posed to the nation before the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Regina Medzini, Meir’s lifelong friend, recalls that young Golda preferred reading to play and socialization. She frequented the local library, consuming works of Russian authors such as Nikolai Gogol, Lev Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; French authors such as Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, and Anatole France; and English and American authors such as Arnold Bennett, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Sinclair Lewis. The greatest influence in Meir’s life, apart from her husband, was her elder sister Sheyna, a radical socialist, who introduced her to Socialism and Zionism. While living with her sister in Denver, Meir studied the writings of Pëter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman and the theories of anarchism, pacifism, and feminism. She also became enamored with the Yiddish literature of Mendele Mokher Safarim, Sholem Aleichem, and Y. L. Peretz. In “The Zionist Purpose,” a speech delivered at Dropsie College in November 26, 1967, Meir talked about the enormous admiration she felt for the works of four writer-activists who had a paramount effect on the Jewish population of pre-state Israel and on her own convictions: Aaron David Gordon’s Selected Essays, Berl Katzenelson’s What Is Socialist Zionism? Aims and Principles of the United Zionist Party, Samuel Yavnieli’s A Journey to Yemen and Its Jews (Hebrew) and Rachel Bluwstein’s Flowers of Perhaps.

These revolutionary socialist-Zionists, founders of the kibbutz movement, strongly believed that only self-labor can emancipate Jews from their ghetto mentality and warrant them a moral and historical right to the land of Israel, where they can erect a model society.

Archives

Israel State Archives, Quiryath Ben Gurion, Jerusalem, includes the official and private documents of Golda Meir.

Archives for the Labour Movements, Lavon Institute, Tel-Aviv, includes official and private documents.

The Ben Gurion Archives, The Ben Gurion Research Center, Sde Boker Campus, Israel, maintains a correspondence file between David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir.

In the United States, extensive collections can be found at the Golda Meir Library at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership in Denver, Colorado.

Printed Sources

Mann, Peggy. Golda: The Life of Israel’s Prime Minister (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971).

Martin, Ralph G. Golda: The Romantic Years (New York: Scribner’s, 1988).

Meir, Golda. Golda Meir Speaks Out, Marie Syrkin (ed.), (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).

———.A Land of Our Own: An Oral Autobiography, Marie Syrkin (ed.), (New York: Putnam’s, 1973).

———.My Life (New York: Putnam’s, 1975).

———.This Is Our Strength: Selected Papers (New York: Macmillan, 1962).

Meir, Menahem. My Mother Golda Meir: A Son’s Evocation of Life with Golda (New York: Arbor House, 1983).

Noble, Iris. Israel’s Golda Meir: Pioneer to Prime Minister (New York: J. Messner, 1972).

Dina Ripsman Eylon

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Mencken, Henry Louis

MENCKEN, HENRY LOUIS (1880–1956)

H. L. Menken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to comfortably bourgeois GermanAmerican parents, August Mencken, co-owner of a cigar store, and Anna Margaret Abhau. Mencken’s German-born paternal grandfather, Burkhardt Mencken, instilled in both his son and grandson a fierce pride in their seventeenthand eigh- teenth-century German ancestry of prominent jurists and scholars. Although he attended Sunday school and was confirmed as a Lutheran Protestant, Mencken shared the rationalist, freethinking skepticism of his father and grandfather. Mencken attended a private school, Knapp’s Institute, Baltimore, patronized largely by middle-class German-Americans, and Baltimore Polytechnic, graduating in 1896 as class valedictorian. Under parental pressure, Mencken worked briefly in the family cigar factory, but his father’s death in 1899 freed him to follow the journalistic career he preferred. Mencken initially worked for the Baltimore Morning Herald, winning rapid successive promotions, and when that journal ceased publication in 1906 he joined the Baltimore Sun, remaining there until 1948, when a stroke forced him into retirement. Mencken quickly won a reputation far surpassing that of a journalist, as an iconoclastic political, literary, and cultural critic whose prolific writings, including newspaper columns, drama criticism, reviews, and essays in a wide variety of periodicals, together with numerous books, were perceived as defining a new, twentieth-century American outlook. From 1908 onward Mencken traveled extensively, acquiring greater familiarity with European cultural trends, but he urged Americans to develop their own robust national literary and aesthetic tradition, reflecting all their country’s variegated racial roots, and reject prevailing establishment assumptions that American literature should be AngloSaxon, idealistic, polite, and morally uplifting. Several successive editions of The American Language, his seminal work on linguistics, demonstrated that enormous differences in usage separated British and American English. Before American intervention in both world wars, Mencken expressed politically contentious and somewhat maverick pro-German views. A leading liberal, modernist intellectual voice dissenting from the complacency of 1920s America, Mencken spoke out vigorously on such socially controversial issues as political intolerance, race, prohibition, evolution, education, and sexual morality. He also introduced numerous new writers, such as James Joyce and Aldous Huxley, to the American public. In the 1930s Mencken’s economically conservative and anti-Soviet, pro-German views placed increasing distance between him and the American left. In the 1980s and 1990s, long after his death, the posthumous publication of Mencken’s diaries and autobiography and the illiberal, racist, and anti-Semitic sentiments they contained again made him a controversial figure.

From childhood Mencken foraged voraciously among British and American literature from his father’s bookshelves and Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. His leading literary inspirations and models included Thomas Henry Huxley, William Makepeace Thackeray, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, O. Henry, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Ambrose Bierce, and the critics George Ade, Percival Pollard, and James Huneker, who fueled his conviction that the critic’s function was to challenge accepted beliefs and oppose all censorship, especially the tyranny of majority views to which democracy was liable. Mencken’s strong German-American self-identification bolstered this outlook and contributed

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