Dictionary of Literary Influences

Allende, Isabel

Early, Gerald (ed.). The Muhammad Ali Reader (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1998). Collected articles from various sources.

Hauser, Thomas. Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). Collected interviews.

Remnick, David. King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (New York: Random House, 1998). Traces Ali’s career from 1962 to the late 1990s.

Schulberg, Budd. Loser and Still Champion: Muhammad Ali (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972). Focuses on Ali’s career following his fight with Joe Frazier.

Torres, Jose. Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story (London, New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1971). Biography told from the perspective of a former boxer. Includes preface by Norman Mailer.

Durthy A. Washington

ALLENDE, ISABEL (1942– )

Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru to Chilean parents, her father a diplomat. Her formal education ended when she graduated from high school in Santiago, Chile at 16 years old. When she was two, her parents divorced and she and her mother moved in with her maternal grandparents, where her grandmother Memé introduced her to the art of storytelling. Her mother remarried another diplomat, so Allende’s adolescent years were spent in Bolivia, the Middle East, and Europe. After high school she worked as a secretary for the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations in Santiago. She left the UN to begin a career in print and broadcast journalism writing a column for a feminist magazine, Paula, and hosting a weekly TV show. She also wrote short stories for children and collaborated in writing and producing plays. Chilean politics shaped the rest of her career. When the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte seized control of Chilean government in 1973, Allende joined church-sponsored groups to provide food and aid to the needy and families of victims of Pinochet’s regime. She aided her compatriots in escaping military persecution until 1975, when she fled Chile for Caracas, Venezuela, with her first husband, Michael Frías, and two children, Paula and Nicolás. In political exile, she wrote her first four novels, Casa de los espiritus/The House of Spirits (Plaza & Janés, 1982; Knopf 1985), De amor y de sombra/Of Love and Shadows (Plaza & Janés, 1984; Knopf 1987), Eva Luna (Knopf, 1988). On January 8, 1981, she began House of Spirits as a farewell letter to her 100-year-old grandfather, who was still in Chile and dying. Allende has additionally written three other novels, a memoir, an autobiography, and a collection of short stories translated in more than 30 languages, the first woman to share bestseller status with her Latin American male counterparts. Her writing follows the Latin American tradition of blurring the lines between reality and dreams through magical realism.

A member of the first generation of Latin American readers who had access to other Latin American writers, Allende cites as her greatest influences the “great writers of the Latin American boom of literature”; among these she specifically credits Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez. As an adolescent she secretly read One Thousand and One Nights, a book that introduced her to the world of imagination and eroticism. Her fiction is influenced by an oral tradition of women telling stories—her mother, her grandmother, and the maids—in addition to radio novellas blasting all day in the kitchen (Crystall and Kuhnheim, 1992). Addition-

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Amado, Jorge

ally, she has read English and Russian novelists. In the 1970s, she read European and North American feminists whose ideas affected her life and her work. Because writing is an organic process for Allende, she writes in her native language, Spanish. Now a resident of the United States, Allende says English has influenced her writing style. In The Stories of Eva Luna (Atheneum, 1991), she uses more precise language, shorter sentences, and less ornamentation. In Daughter of Fortune (Knopf, 1999) and Portrait in Sepia (HarperCollins 2000), Allende connects Latin American and North American story and myth.

Archives

Daily letters to and from her mother are known to exist, but are not yet available for research. See, however, “Isabel Allende” n.d., http://www.isabelallende.com, accessed July 30, 2002. Traces literary influences, explains her writing process, lists professional accomplishments, and contains 32 photos from the author’s private album.

Printed Sources

Allende, Isabel. Paula, Margaret Sayers Peden (trans.), (New York: Harper, 1994). Allende’s autobiography chronicles her vigil over her daughter Paula’s terminal illness and documents the author’s writing and personal life.

Crystall, Elyse, Jill Kuhnheim, and Mary Layoun. “An Interview with Isabel Allende,” Contemporary Literature 33, 1 (1992), 584–601.

Jill E. Eichhorn

AMADO, JORGE (1912–2001)

Jorge Amado was born on the cacao farm Auricídia, in the rural area of Ferradas, district of Itabuna, in the northeastern state of Bahia, Argentina. He grew up in Ilhéus; at 11 he was sent to the Jesuit college in Salvador. He studied law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he graduated in 1935, but he never became a practicing lawyer. Fascinated by Russia, the Russian revolution, and Russian literature, he became a militant of the Brazilian Communist Party, and as such was elected to Congress. He was strongly influenced by the novels of such Russian writers as Aleksandr Fadeyev (The Rout, 1927), Aleksandr Serafimovich (The Iron Flood, 1927), Isaak Babel (Red Cavalry, 1926), Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Pietrov (The Twelve Chairs, 1928), and Ilya Ehrenburg (The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, 1922). He also read Jews without Money (1930) by Michael Gold, who became his close friend afterward. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens brought to his attention the idea of the deprived childhood as raw material for his early fiction. One of the first books that excited his social conscience was David Copperfield, which especially influenced Captains of the Sands (1937), a novel that depicts the lives of homeless children living on the streets of Salvador, his most popular novel. Critics prefer The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell (1961) for its magical realism and The Violent Land (1943), a well-structured historical novel and probably his finest narrative.

The novels that exerted more influence upon Brazil and the entire world are

Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1958), and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966). Both were made into successful movies, television series, and soap operas. The film version of “Dona Flor” (1976) is still the most popular Brazilian movie ever made. These novels helped create a worldwide stereotypical image of Brazil as being an

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Andric´, Ivo

exotic tropical country with spicy ingredients of a folk saga tempered with lusty mulattas, carnival, sex, and Latin machismo. Amado’s 25 novels have been translated into 49 languages and have been published in 55 countries.

Archives

Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado built in 1987, and located in Pelourinho, on the historic side of Salvador, maintains a large collection of materials (mainly books, photos, videos, and posters).

Printed Sources

Brower, Keith H. et al. (eds.). Jorge Amado: New Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 2001). A comprehensive account of his major works and facets by selected scholars.

Candido, Antonio. “Poesia, documento e história.” In Brigada ligeira e outros escritos (São Paulo: Editora da Unesp, 1992). Remarkable insights into Brazilian fiction of the 1930s, and on Amado’s first novels, especially on The Violent Land, by the most reputable Brazilian critic of today.

Duarte, Eduardo de Assis. Jorge Amado: romance em tempo de utopia (Natal: UFRN, 1995). A former Ph.D. dissertation is the best source for Amado as a leftist writer. Includes an extensive bibliography and an interview with the novelist.

Galvão, Walnice Nogueira. “Amado: respeitoso, respeitável.” In Saco de Gatos (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1976). A sharp criticism on Amado’s works, especially on Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars, from a feminist perspective, by one of Brazil’s prominent scholars.

Lima, Luís Costa. “Jorge Amado.” In Afrânio Coutinho (ed.), A literatura no Brasil. 2nd ed., vol. 5 (Rio de Janeiro: Sul Americana, 1970). A restrictive reading of Amado’s novels.

Tavares, Paulo. Criaturas de Jorge Amado, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1985). The most comprehensive list of characters taken from his fiction published up to 1983. Includes 4,910 entries on characters, animals and birds used as proper names, and places used as settings for his novels.

Gentil de Faria

´

ANDRIC, IVO (1892–1975)

Ivo Andric´ was born in the Bosnian town of Travnik. After the death of his father, the two-year-old Andric´ was sent to live with relatives in Visˇegrad, the setting of his most famous novel, The Bridge on the Drina. Andric´ completed elementary school in Visˇegrad and studied at the gymnasium in Sarajevo (1903–12), where he became associated with the nationalist movement, Young Bosnia. He enrolled in 1912 at the University of Zagreb, the following year at the University of Vienna, and then, in spring 1914, at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. After the start of World War I he was arrested in Croatia for his connections with Young Bosnia, whose members had carried out the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and he was held under guard until 1917. After the war, Andric´ edited a journal of South Slavic literature, in which he published his own writings. He entered the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry in 1920 and served at posts throughout Europe over the next two decades. He completed his doctorate in 1924 at Karl Franz University in Graz, submitting the dissertation, “The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule,” a critical assessment of Islamic influence in his homeland. Andric´’s final diplomatic post was as ambassador to Berlin (1938–41). He resigned in protest against his government’s close relations with Nazi Germany

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Angelou, Maya

and returned to Belgrade. During the war he devoted himself to writing three novels: The Bridge on the Drina, Bosnian Chronicle, and The Woman from Sarajevo. All three books were published after the liberation in 1945. Andric´ supported the communist regime established after the war by Josip Broz Tito. In 1946 he became a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and was elected first president of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union. In 1950 he was elected to the Federal Assembly, and in 1954 he became a member of the Communist Party. In 1961 he became the first Yugoslav writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Andric´ once remarked on the various literary influences that shaped his style: “Chinese verses, Scandinavians and Poles, French, German, and Russian writers. . . . How could it be possible to extract from that, and far more that has not been mentioned, something that should be called a decisive influence?” (Hawkesworth 1984, 41). His first loves as a reader had been Serbian historical novels and the adventures of Jules Verne, Sir Walter Scott, and Cervantes, which he read in German translation while a student. Andric´ mastered the classical languages, German, French, and Italian before he left the gymnasium, and he read widely in those languages. Among his favorite authors as a student were Thomas Mann, whom Andric´ appreciated for his contemplation of the power of legend and the irrational; Marcus Aurelius, from whom he gained a stoic outlook and an affinity for reflective literary prose; and Walt Whitman, whom Andric´ admired for his celebration of universal brotherhood. Particularly influential was Søren Kierkegaard. When he was arrested at the start of World War I, Andric´ was allowed just one volume in his cell: Kierkegaard’s Either-Or (1843). Andric´ found resonance in Kierkegaard’s awareness of paradox as a source of passion in life and the melancholy brought by reflection on the divergence of the real and possible. Andric´ also counted among his influences nineteenth-century and contemporary writers in Slovene and his native Serbo-Croatian. Most important were the Montenegrin poet Petar Petrovic´ Njegosˇ and the nineteenth-century collector of Serbian folk songs, Vuk Karadzˇic´. Proof of Andric´’s love of reading is the fact that he donated the stipend from his Nobel Prize to purchase books for school libraries in Yugoslavia.

Archives

Personal Fund of Ivo Andric´, Archive of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, Serbia.

Printed Sources

Hawkesworth, Celia. Ivo Andric´: Bridge between East and West (London: Athlone, 1984).

ˇ

Juricˇic´ , Zelimir B. The Man and the Artist: Essays on Ivo Andric´ (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986).

Mukerji, Vanita Singh. Ivo Andric´: A Critical Biography (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1990).

Bruce R. Berglund

ANGELOU, MAYA (1928– )

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents were Bailey Johnson, a doorkeeper and naval dietitian, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a nurse and real estate agent. Her childhood, which she recounts poetically in the

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Angelou, Maya

first of her five autobiographies, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was spent primarily in Stamps, Arkansas, where she was sent to live when her parents divorced. Angelou attended public schools in Arkansas and California, and she studied music, drama, and dance privately. At the age of sixteen, she had her son, Guy, and began supporting the two of them with a series of jobs, including being a cook, a waitress, a streetcar conductor, and, briefly, a madam. In more recent years, Angelou has been an actress, a singer, a playwright and director, a dance teacher, a civil rights activist, and a lecturer. Her primary literary contribution has been in the field of autobiography; she has also produced five volumes of poetry, as well as several plays and screenplays. Her most prominent themes are the triumph of the human spirit over adversity and the transforming power of art. In 1993, she received national attention when she read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton. She has been visiting writer and lecturer at UCLA, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University. Since 1981, she has been a professor at Wake Forest University.

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1970, Angelou recounts her early reading of contemporary African American writers. She recalls that she and her brother, Bailey, a prominent figure in this and other works, reject a scene from Shakespeare to memorize, fearing that their strong-willed grandmother would be furious when she discovered the author was white. Instead, the brother and sister choose James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation.” Angelou also describes the healing function of reading during her childhood: she is sent back to Stamps after having been raped by a mother’s boyfriend in St. Louis, and having responded by remaining mute for five years. During this time, she was tutored by a Mrs. Flowers, a woman she refers to as the “aristocrat of Black Stamps.” She read the classics under the tutelage of Mrs. Flowers, and she describes learning from her that the “wonderful, beautiful Negro race” survives “in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (including preachers, musicians, and blues singers).” She pays homage to her African American literary forbears in some of her titles, including that of her first book, which is taken from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy”; the title of her fourth book, The Heart of a Woman, comes from a poem by Harlem Renaissance writer Georgia Douglas Johnson.

In interviews, Angelou has acknowledged her debt to writers such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Baldwin. Angelou herself became involved with the Harlem Writers Guild when she was inspired by the social activist writer John Killens to move to Brooklyn in 1958. This group of writers included John Henrik Clarke and Paule Marshall, as well as Baldwin. Angelou was encouraged to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Baldwin and Jules Feiffer, who had heard her stories of her Arkansas childhood. In Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou, Dolly McPherson places Angelou in a tradition of African American autobiography, beginning with The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudau Equiano, or Gastavus Vassa, The African and continuing through Frederick Douglass, Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Anne Moody, James Weldon Johnson, and Julius Lester. In an interview with McPherson, Angelou draws comparisons with her autobiographical writing and that of Maxine Hong Kingston. Angelou’s life and writing also have been shaped by her involvement in the civil rights movement and social reform. In 1959, she worked as the coordinator for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Confer-

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Apollinaire, Guillaume

ence and shortly thereafter lived in Egypt and Ghana, writing about and agitating for social change. Her fifth book, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, is dedicated to Julian Mayfield and Malcolm X; in it, she recounts her growing appreciation for her African “home.”

Archives

Z.Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, Department of Rare Books: houses many of Angelou’s manuscripts and drafts.

Printed Sources

Elliot, Jeffrey M. (ed.). Conversations with Maya Angelou (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1989).

McPherson, Dolly A. Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou (Camden Town, London: Virago Press, 1991).

Tate, Claudia (ed.). Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983).

Linda A. Barnes

APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME (1880–1918)

As part of the avant-garde in French literature at the turn of the twentieth century, Guillaume Apollinaire represents the last of the traditional lyric poets and the first of the modern literary iconoclasts. An enigmatic figure, Apollinaire both courted and scorned intellectualism, perhaps stemming from the secrecy surrounding his illegitimate birth on August 26, 1880. At the age of twenty in 1900, Apollinaire moved to Paris, where he spent the last eighteen years of his life. While there, he cultivated the friendship of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Andre Derain, and his lover, Marie Laurencin. Although best known as an avant-garde poet, he cultivated a reputation as a defender of modern painting and a promoter of new styles in literature and the graphic arts. He continuously used elements of his own life in his literature, so that there was, indeed, no real separation between man and writer. Each poem and story was a commemoration of an event in his life, but he was also acutely aware of the effect his work could have on society.

However, his lifestyle only served to further alienate him from the French people he tried so hard to call his own. He had always considered himself first and foremost a Frenchman, but his fellow français often thought otherwise. Disenchanted, he joined the French army, first in artillery on April 4, 1915, and then in infantry, where he was wounded in March 1916; in total, he spent 11 months on the front, and his celebrated quote, “Ah Dieu! Que la guerre est jolie, risqué fort de ne pas etre si simple” has often been misinterpreted. In other words, although he did not comprehend the reason for the brutality, it, unfortunately, became second nature for him just as it did for every other soldier. The war led to a more questioning Apollinaire, and at 37 at the end of the war, he used the war as a playing field with which to comment on the crisis among young people.

This questioning in turn led to the creation of Le poete assassine, a collage of 18 stories detailing a man’s life from his birth to his career as a poet to his death at the hands of a mob. The collection of short stories was often broken, and the narrative changes in tone from humorous to serious, yet leaving no doubt regarding his political leanings, since his point of view regarding the Germans remains fluid from beginning to end. In stories such as “Cas du brigadier,” the allies fared well, while

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Arendt, Hannah

the German soldier met his fate. Apollinaire intended this work to represent his desire to act as the reconciling party between modernism and traditionalism, and Apollinaire only added one story to this collection of short stories once the war began.

Apollinaire was a French nationalist from the beginning of his career, more because it was tied to his attraction to naturism, and he died a French nationalist. His war poetry demonstrates not only an enthusiasm for war, but an emphasis on the future of society. Although the combination of his prewar nationalism and the nationalist tendencies of the prewar French avant-garde did not guarantee his acceptance in French society, it did cement his celebrity as a literary genius. Ronald St. Onge contends that “the metamorphosis of Apollinaire’s political thought led him from a youthful espousal of anarchistic ideals to a manifestation of chauvinistic zeal in his later years” (St. Onge 1971, 516). His family background, his schooling and literary tastes, as well as his political ideologies could have led him to further his anarchistic ideals, yet he remained independent and open to all ideas, including the coinage of some of his own. His position as both an avant-garde artist and a critic caused problems with some of the Nationalist traditionalists, and by defending avant-garde methods and art, he was often attacked and accused of being a Jew or an infidel. With the themes of metamorphism and mimesis, transformation and mimesis, dedoublement and disguise, Apollinaire established himself as poet, art critic, author, and master of many tasks.

Archives

“Guillaume Apollinaire.” La Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Le Cabinet des Manuscrits. Musee Guillaume Apollinaire. Stavelot, France.

Printed Sources

Adamson, Walter L. “Apollinaire’s Politics: Modernism, Nationalism, and the Public Sphere in Avant-garde Paris,” Modernism/Modernity 6, 3 (1999), 33–56.

Barry, David. The Creative Vision of Guillaume Apollinaire: A Study of Imagination (Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1982).

Bates, Scott. Guillaume Apollinaire (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1967).

Bohn, Willard. Apollinaire and the Faceless Man: The Creation and Evolution of a Modern Motif

(Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991).

———. “From Sign to Signature in Apollinaire’s ‘Le Cheval’.” In Understanding French Poetry: Essays for a New Millennium, Stamos Metzidakis (ed.), (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 51–70.

Pierre, Roland. “Guillaume Apollinaire et L’Avenir,” Europe: Revue litteraire Mensuelle 421 (1964), 155–65.

St. Onge, Ronald. “Reflections of the Political World in the Works of Guillaume Apollinaire” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1971).

Jennifer Harrison

ARENDT, HANNAH (1906–1975)

Fleeing from Germany in the 1930s, Hannah Arendt became one of the West’s leading political scientists and opponents of totalitarianism. She was born in Hannover, Germany, as Johanna, the daughter of Martha Cohn and Paul Arendt, both educated and prosperous Jews from Königsberg, Prussia. In 1910 they returned to Königsberg, where Arendt began her schooling in Frau Stein’s kindergarten and

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Arendt, Hannah

Frau Sittznik’s elementary school. Her father died of tertiary syphilis in 1913 after two years in the Königsberg Psychiatric Hospital. Her mother remarried in 1920. Arendt was always close to her mother but had uneasy and uncertain relationships with her stepfather, Martin Beerwald, and two stepsisters, one of whom committed suicide in 1932 at the age of 30.

Mother and daughter fled to Berlin as soon as World War I erupted. Arendt attended the girls’ lyceum in the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg. She began to appreciate the art of Käthe Kollwitz and the leftist politics of Konrad Schmidt, Eduard Bernstein, Joseph Bloch, Rosa Luxembourg, and Karl Liebknecht. After the war, back in Königsberg, she briefly attended the Luiseschule, the girls’ gymnasium, until expelled for insubordination. Nevertheless, two subsequent years as a special student at the University of Berlin earned her the opportunity to take the Abitur examination, and thus she received her Luiseschule diploma in 1924. By then she already had read Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, and Immanuel Kant and had studied theology under Romano Guardini at Berlin. She learned of the philosopher Martin Heidegger in 1923 from her friend Ernst Grumach, who attended Heidegger’s earliest lectures at the University of Marburg. Through her lifelong friend, Anne Mendelssohn Weil, a descendant of both Moses and Felix Mendelssohn, Arendt learned about Rahel Varnhagen.

Almost immediately upon matriculating at Marburg in 1924, Arendt began a love affair with her teacher, Heidegger. She also studied under Rudolf Bultmann and met fellow student Hans Jonas at Marburg, then after spending a semester in 1925 at Freiburg im Breisgau to learn from Heidegger’s mentor, Edmund Husserl, transferred to Heidelberg to become the protégé of Jaspers, under whom she studied Friedrich Nietzsche, August Strindberg, Vincent Van Gogh, Max Weber, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. There she met Karl Frankenstein, Erich Neumann, Benno Georg Leopold von Wiese, and Erwin Loewenson, and studied German Romanticism under Friedrich Gundolf. Directed by Jaspers, she wrote her doctoral dissertation in 1929 on “The Concept of Love in St. Augustine.”

In the 1930s she showed increasing interest in Bertolt Brecht, the Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld, Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Walter Benjamin. The rise of Adolf Hitler pushed her toward political philosophy. She was arrested in the spring of 1933, but was released after eight days, and escaped to France via Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. She was naturalized American in 1951.

Archives

The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress contains 25,000 items in 38 linear feet of Arendt’s “correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book manuscripts, subject files, transcripts of trial proceedings, notes, and printed matter pertaining to [her] writings and academic career.” The co-executors of her literary estate were Lotte Kohler and Mary McCarthy.

Printed Sources

Alte Synagoge Essen. Hannah Arendt: Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüdin (Essen: Klartext, 1995).

Clément, Catherine. Martin and Hannah: A Novel, Julia Shirek Smith (trans.), (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001).

Ettinger, Elzbieta. Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

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Armstrong, Louis

Kristeva, Julia. Hannah Arendt, Ross Guberman (trans.), (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2001).

McGowan, John. Hannah Arendt: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

May, Derwent. Hannah Arendt (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1986).

Prinz, Alois. Beruf Philosophin, oder die Liebe zur Welt: die Lebensgeschichte der Hannah Arendt

(Weinheim: Beltz & Gelberg, 1998).

Taminiaux, Jacques. The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger,

Michael Gendre (trans.), (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997).

Villa, Dana Richard. Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

Eric v.d. Luft

ARMSTRONG, LOUIS (1901–1971)

Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on August 4, 1901. His mother and father separated shortly after his birth, leaving him in the care of his maternal grandmother for several years. At age six, Louis attended the Fisk School for boys. By the middle of the fifth grade, he had dropped out of school. From an early age, Louis worked selling newspapers, hoping to make a few coins for necessities. While working with the Karnofsky brothers on a junk wagon, Louis entertained the children in the streets, playing a tin horn purchased for him by Alex Karnofsky. In later years, Armstrong often recalled the kindness and warmth demonstrated to him by the Karnofskys, especially their assistance with the purchase of his first cornet.

On New Year’s Eve 1913, Louis was arrested for firing his stepfather’s revolver. He was sent to the Colored Waif’s Home. At the home, he received his first formal music instruction from Peter Davis. Davis rewarded Louis’s dedication by appointing him leader of the home’s band. After his release, Louis earned money by delivering coal and playing cornet in the local honky-tonks. He developed a close relationship with Joe “King” Oliver (1885–1938), a highly recognized cornetist. In

Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words: Selected Writings, Armstrong describes Oliver’s influence, stating: “He was a Creator, with unlimited Ideas, and had a heart as big as a whale when it came to helping the underdog in music, such as me” (Armstrong 1999, 174). After Oliver left for Chicago in 1918, Armstrong took his place in Kid Ory’s band. In August of 1922, Armstrong received an invitation from “Papa Joe” to join his Creole Jazz Band in Chicago, making his first recordings the following year.

Armstrong’s career spanned more than 50 years, with performances in many countries throughout the world. He was a brilliant trumpet player, bringing many new ideas to jazz improvisation. As a vocalist, he exuded warmth and charisma to audiences worldwide. Armstrong had a deep desire to communicate his innermost thoughts with everyone he came in contact with. He was a prolific writer whose works include two autobiographies, memoirs, notebooks, letters, and numerous magazine articles. In his introduction to Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words: Selected Writings, Thomas Brothers discusses some of Armstrong’s purposes for writing. According to Brothers, writing helped Armstrong “stay in touch with distant

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Armstrong, Louis

friends and admirers.” In addition, writing enabled him to “supply professional writers with material that they could use for publicity purposes.” Brothers believes that “Armstrong writes because he sees himself as a writer.” Writing was a hobby for Armstrong, and “his portable typewriter became his off-stage passion” (Armstrong 1999, viii–x). When questioned in a radio interview about carrying a dictionary and a book of synonyms and antonyms while traveling, Armstrong explains, “I didn’t get much education when I was young, you know, so I’m still learning” (Armstrong 1999, xi).

Despite Armstrong’s lack of a formal education, he had a great interest in reading. According to Joshua Berrett, editor of The Louis Armstrong Companion: Eight Decades of Commentary, Armstrong’s home in Corona, Queens “housed a library of books covering such topics as diet, poetry, biography, history, and race relations.” Armstrong’s collection also included “special presentation copies from Langston Hughes (Famous American Negroes), Richard Avedon, Truman Capote, and others, including a physicist who had been inspired by Louis’s trumpet” (Berrett 1999, 102). In his autobiography Swing That Music, Armstrong endorses two books on jazz—Le Jazz Hot by Hugues Panassie and On the Frontiers of Jazz by Robert Goffin. He describes these texts as being “carefully written” and “very interesting to anyone who wants to study modern music” (Armstrong 1936, 104).

Not only was Armstrong a reader, but he also cared deeply about how the written word was communicated. In Swing That Music, Armstrong states “I especially want to make this first book on swing truly helpful to students and amateurs and young musicians everywhere” (Armstrong 1936, 117). In another chapter, he explains that the language of swing contains more than 400 words not commonly understood. Armstrong tells his readers: “I hope this book will help to explain it a little—it is the real reason I have tried to write it and kept on after I found out what hard-going writing was for a man who has lived all of his life mostly with a trumpet, not a pencil, in his hand” (Armstrong 1936, 78).

Archives

Hogan Jazz archives, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.

Louis Armstrong archives, Queens College, Flushing, New York.

Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Printed Sources

Armstrong, Louis. Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words: Selected Writings, Thomas Brothers (ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

———.Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, Dan Morgenstern (intro.) [1954] (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1986).

———.Swing That Music (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936).

Bergreen, Laurence. Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (New York: Broadway Books, 1997).

Berrett, Joshua (ed.). The Louis Armstrong Companion: Eight Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer Books, 1999).

Giddons, Gary. Satchmo, produced by Toby Byron/Multiprises (New York: A Dolphin BookDoubleday, 1988).

Goffin, Robert. Horn of Plenty: The Story of Louis Armstrong, James F. Bezou (trans.), (New York: Allen, Towne & Heath, Inc., 1947).

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