Dictionary of Literary Influences

Pirandello, Luigi

Gale, Steven H. Butter’s Going Up: A Critical Analysis of Harold Pinter’s Work (Durham: Duke University Press, 1977).

——— (ed.). Harold Pinter: Critical Approaches (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986).

Merritt, Susan Hollis. Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).

Peacock, D. Keith. Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997).

Prentice, Penelope. The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic (New York: Garland, 2000). Sakellaridou, Elizabeth. Pinter’s Female Portraits: A Study of Female Characters in the Plays of

Harold Pinter (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1988).

Thompson, David T. Pinter: The Player’s Playwright (New York: Schocken, 1985).

D. S. Lawson

PIRANDELLO, LUIGI (1867–1936)

Luigi Pirandello, Italian playwright, novelist, and literary essayist and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1934, was born in the Sicilian town of Agrigento and educated in Palermo (1880–86); Rome (1887–89); and Bonn, Germany (1889–91), where he graduated with a degree in romance philology. The author of over 200 short stories, he gained wide acclaim for his anti-naturalistic novels The Late Mattia Pascal (1904), The Old and the Young (1913), Shoot! (1925), and One, None, and a Hundred-Thousand (1926), focusing on the turmoil of consciousness and on the predicament of civilization that emerged from other European modernist writers such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Robert Musil. A subsequent interest in theater made Pirandello one of the most influential dramatists in twentieth-century Europe. From regional plays in Sicilian dialect such as Better Think Twice About It and Liolà (1916) to the drama of the human condition in

If You Think So (1917), The Pleasure of Honesty (1917), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), and Henry IV (1922), Pirandello radically renovated the conception of the drama as a genre and of the stage as a space of representation.

Pirandello’s early readings included the poetry of Giosué Carducci and Arturo Graf, combined with a fascination for tales of magic and local folklore that announce the regional rural setting of his first short story, “Capannetta” (1884), in which Pirandello’s debt toward Giovanni Verga’s novella Jeli il pastore was also evident. While an interest in poetry and in romanticism persisted during his studies in Germany, where he translated Goethe’s Roman Elegies and read Tieck, Chamisso, and Heine, Pirandello also approached thirteenth-century Italian poet Cecco Angiolieri as the starting point for a meditation on the concept of humor, the topic of his eponymous 1908 essay in which Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Cervantes’s Don Quixote proved equally crucial.

Another 1908 essay, “Arte e scienza,” provides insights into Pirandello’s polemical reception of Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetics, separating intuitive from intellectual knowledge and also documenting the influence exerted on Pirandello by Alfred Binet’s Les altérations de la personnalité (1892). Binet’s analysis of the coexistence of different personalities in the same subject and of the action of involuntary memory contributes to a dynamic and complex vision of the individual that foreshadowed the disturbing plurality of Pirandello’s major characters.

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Although Pirandello’s art soon transcended the naturalistic slant of Italian verismo, he owed a great deal not only to Verga for his idea of the character as a loser, but also to Luigi Capuana, who initiated him to fiction and then to theater and included him in his Roman intellectual circle (1892), where Pirandello developed solid ties with Ugo Ojetti (who later stirred in him the curiosity for films), and playwright Massimo Bontempelli, with whom he shared a brief experience of the permanent Teatro d’Arte (1924–25), becoming the director. A direct link with another representative of verismo, Grazia Deledda, emerged from Pirandello’s novel Her husband (1912), which takes Deledda herself and her husband as models for the two protagonists.

In Pirandello’s shift toward theater and in his development of the grotesque mode, intellectual exchanges with Sicilian playwright and impresario Nino Martoglio and with Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo, author of Marionette, che passione!, were also pivotal. But the turning point in Pirandello’s theater and life was certainly the encounter with actress Marta Abba (1926), who became not only the interpreter of his plays but also his muse, inspiring such new scripts as As You Want Me, The Wives’ Friend, and To Find Oneself.

Archives

Biblioteca-Museo Luigi Pirandello, Agrigento, Italy. Photographs, first editions, manuscripts, and unpublished documents.

Printed Sources

Aguirre D’Amico, Maria Luisa (ed.). Album Pirandello (Milano: Mondadori, 1992). Bassanese, Flora. Understanding Luigi Pirandello (Columbia: University of South Carolina

Press, 1997).

Bini, Daniela. Pirandello and His Muse: The Plays for Marta Abba (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).

Giudice, Gaspare. Pirandello: A Biography. Alastair Hamilton (trans.), (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

Nicoletta Pireddu

PLANCK, KARL ERNST LUDWIG MAX (1858–1947)

Max Planck was born in Kiel, Germany, to Johann Julius Wilhelm von Planck, professor of jurisprudence, and his second wife, Emma (Patzig) Planck. At school, Planck was a gifted student, with a strong aptitude for music and philology, though not much for mathematics. He received the school prize in catechism almost every year. He began his studies at the University of Munich during the winter semester of 1874–75 majoring in mathematics and physics. In 1877 he transferred to the University of Berlin, where he met two professors whose teaching and philosophies would help to shape his own thinking: Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff, both of whom were leading physicists of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Though Planck enjoyed moments of music and frivolity at home with colleagues and friends, and long walks in the Alps, his activities seldom strayed far from the scientific world. His meticulous notes demonstrate his continual commitment to the latest research in physics. Articles by Rudolf Clausius on thermodynamics were

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especially influential on the young Planck and in part led him to write his dissertation “On the Second Law of the Mechanical Theory of Heat,” which he defended successfully in 1879 in Munich.

In 1885, Planck gained a measure of financial security with his appointment at the University of Kiel as associate professor of theoretical physics. In 1887 after the death of Gustav Kirchhoff, Planck was appointed as his successor. While at the University of Berlin during the 1890s, Planck began to investigate radiative equilibria. Very little was known about the properties of thermal radiation. Planck had to construct a “black body” and attempt to find the universal function. With this new concept, Planck had to assume among other things that the energy e was not a continuous quantity but a discrete one, proportional to its frequency n (e = hn). The introduction of a natural constant h, the Planck quantum of action, was a significant step, since it contradicted commonly held assumptions. For his work, Planck received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918.

The last years of Max Planck’s life were made difficult by wartime and its aftermath. In February 1944, his home in the Berlin suburb of Grunewald was totally destroyed by a fire after an air raid. He lost almost everything, including his scientific notebooks and diaries. In May 1945 some American colleagues found Planck and took him to Göttingen to live out his final years.

Archives

Max Planck Society (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V.) Hofgartenstraße 8, 80539 Munich, Germany.

Printed Works

Greenberg, Valerie D. Transgressive Readings: The Texts of Franz Kafka and Max Planck (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).

Heilbron, J. L. The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

Planck, Max. The New Science. 3 complete works: Where Is Science Going? The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics; The Philosophy of Physics, James Murphy and W. H. Johnston (trans.), (New York: Meridian Books, 1959).

Peter E. Carr

POPPER, KARL RAIMUND (1902–1994)

Karl Popper was born in Vienna. The social and intellectual milieu of Popper’s early years was largely progressive and socialist embodied in anticlerical secularism, political pacifism, and social reform. From 1908 to 1913, he attended the Freie Schule. His stints in three different Viennese gymnasiums (1913–18) ended with Popper leaving school without his Matura and attending the University of Vienna at first as a nonmatriculated student—though he eventually passed the Matura in 1921. Studying mathematics, physics, philosophy, and psychology, Popper earned his doctorate in 1928. He taught secondary school in Vienna (1930–36) until increasing apprehension of Nazism caused him to pursue a philosophy lectureship at Canterbury University College in Christchurch, New Zealand (1937–45). In 1945, with the assistance of Friedrich von Hayek, Popper was hired as a reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics. Promoted to full professorship in 1949, he retired as professor emeritus in 1969.

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Popper’s earliest scientific and ethical considerations were spurred by the fantasies of Selma Lagerlöf and the real-life adventures of Norwegian explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen. Arthur Arndt, a family friend and mentor to the young Popper, explained Karl Marx and Charles Darwin to him, shaped Popper’s lifelong engagement with socialism, and exposed Popper to the pacifism of Bertha von Suttner. Most inf luentially, Arndt introduced him to the Monists— an Ernst Mach–inspired association dedicated to the scientific reform of society. There he was introduced to the progressive monist Josef Popper Lynkeus with whom he shared a concern for social welfare and individualism. In the mid1920s, Popper’s involvement with the socialist Karl Frank’s Youth Scout movement led to his conversion to communism, which quickly ended in disillusionment. Popper temporarily found relief in Søren Kierkegaard’s theology but wrestled throughout his life with Kierkegaard’s existential dilemmas. Interest in educational reform led to Popper’s interaction with Karl Bühler and into confrontation with the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the individual psychology of Alfred Adler. He adopted Edgar Zilsel’s critique of both. Popper’s interest in the natural sciences led him to the theoretical physics of Albert Einstein and mathematics as propounded in the lectures of Hans Hahn. Also unmistakable are the inf luences of Karl Polanyi on Popper’s social science methodology and the exposure to Heinrich Gomperz’s work on logic and psychology. A friendship with Julius Kraft introduced Popper to the controversial Kantian philosophy of Jakob Fries and Leonard Nelson, especially the latter’s epistemology. Nelson spurred Popper’s critique of David Hume, neo-Kantianism, preeminently the form expounded by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Marxism. Popper was greatly indebted to Immanuel Kant, specifically Kant’s ethical individualism and cosmopolitanism. Popper’s scientific paradigm and critical philosophy were a synthesis of Kant and Einstein embodying a hope of progress but remaining open to critique. His thoughts found parallel roots in Alfred Tarsk’s theory of truth and the liberal Christian teachings of universal emancipation and individual responsibility. Popper’s philosophical development was deeply rooted in his critical dialogue with the Vienna Circle. He read Ludwig Wittgenstein and critiqued the logical positivism of Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and Otto Neurath as well as the Circle’s synthesis of thought found in Herbert Feigl. Neurath’s model of social planning along with Felix Kaufmann’s Methodenlehre der Sozialwissenschaften (1936) and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) found voice and critique in Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957). At the core of Popper’s critique resided a deep concern for an ethical individualism and an open society opposed to any form of ethical collectivism and historicism. The latter themes Popper saw embodied in such diverse areas as the aesthetic modernism of Arnold Schönberg’s music, the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx, and the sociology of Max Weber.

Archives

Karl Popper Collection, The Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Calif.: majority of Karl Popper’s papers, including works, letters and correspondence, teaching materials, and photographs.

Karl-Popper-Sammlung, University of Klagenfurt, Austria: Karl Popper’s library including annotated books.

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Printed Sources

Hacohen, Malachi Haim. Karl Popper, The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.). The Philosophy of Karl Popper (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1974).

Rouven J. Steeves

POUND, EZRA LOOMIS (1885–1972)

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, and in childhood moved near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Raised a Presbyterian, the adult Pound rejected Christianity, embracing pagan mysticism. He attended the University of Pennsylvania (1901–3) and Hamilton College (1903–5), returning to Pennsylvania for a master’s degree in romance languages (1905–6). Afterward, Pound received an appointment at Pennsylvania as Harrison Fellow in Romanics (1906–7). He taught briefly at Wabash College before leaving for England and Europe. Through his poetry, criticism, and personal association with W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and others, he helped pioneer the modernist movement in arts and letters. During World War II Pound ran afoul of the U.S. government for making profascist radio broadcasts in Italy. After being found incompetent to stand trial, he spent 12 years at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. Upon release, he returned to Italy to live out his last years.

Pound’s writing testifies to his voluminous reading. He knew the troubadors and read sources such as Justin H. Smith’s The Troubadors at Home and Sâr Péladan’s Le Secret de Troubadors. He researched Lope de Vega, basing a chapter in The Spirit of Romance (1910) on his unfinished dissertation on de Vega’s plays. References to Guido Cavalcanti and Dante abound in his writing, and Pound based an opera on François Villon’s verse. Pound knew Robert Browning’s poetry, and both Sappho’s and Catullus’s influences mark his work (Laughlin 1987, 67, 86, 128–39). Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius is an adaptation of that Latin author’s poetry. As Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa’s executor, Pound edited and published Fenollosa’s papers on Japanese Noh drama and on Chinese poetry (Stock 1970, 148). Pound thereby became fascinated with Chinese authors, especially with Confucius and Mencius. Pound studied economics and politics, reading C. H. Douglas’s Economic Democracy and Credit Power and Democracy, the Adams–Jefferson letters, John Quincy Adams’s

Diary, Allan Nevins’s American Political, Social and Intellectual Life, and Martin Van Buren’s autobiography (Tytell 1987, 226–27). Saint Ambrose influenced his thought on usury, and his reading included studies of monetary theory and economics by Alexander Del Mar and Silvio Gesell. Pound’s knowledge of German anthropologist Leo Frobenius probably came via Douglas Fox’s translation in African Genesis (Laughlin 1987, 38, 123–27, 193). Finally, French author Remy De Gourmont and British writer T. E. Hulme both influenced Pound’s thought (Stock 1970, 241–42; Ackroyd 1980, 19).

Archives

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas: Manuscripts and correspondence relating to Pound’s art and politics ranging from 1905 to 1975.

Ezra Pound Archives, Brunnenberg Castle, Merano, Italy: Extensive holdings at the home of Pound’s grandson, including much of his personal library.

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Department of Special Collections and Archives, University of Idaho Library, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho: First editions of Pound’s poetry, criticism, and translations; also works about him by supporters and detractors. The collection also contains facsimiles of over 2,000 articles, essays, poems, etc., from a wide range of rare or obscure publications.

Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.: General and family correspondence, Pound’s manuscripts and those written by others; also financial and personal papers.

Printed Sources

Ackroyd, Peter. Ezra Pound and His World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980). Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,

1971).

Laughlin, James. Pound as Wuz: Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1987).

Stock, Noel. The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). Tytell, James. Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (New York: Anchor Press, 1987).

Donald Carlson

PRESLEY, ELVIS AARON (1935–1977)

Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. At 13 his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, his hometown for the remainder of his life. In 1954, a year after graduating from Humes High School, Presley began recording with Sun Records, where he continued to record for over a year until he signed with RCA Victor in late 1955. Presley then became hugely popular due to songs such as “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Love Me Tender.” Presley’s career was temporarily halted in 1958 when he was drafted for a two-year tour of military service. Throughout the 1960s, he appeared in 33 films that coincided with a decline in his career; a decline eventually salvaged with his 1968 television special and a return to live performances. Presley devoted the 1970s to recording songs that were pseudobiographical in nature and to over 1,000 live performances. One concert performed in 1973 was broadcast via satellite and viewed by over one billion people. Though this was the peak of his superstardom, his life began to spin out of control. After a 1973 divorce from wife Priscilla Belleau, Presley became increasingly dependent on prescription medication, which led to a fatal heart attack on August 16, 1977.

During the mid 1960s, Presley, under the influence of hairdresser Larry Geller, began to read on a regular basis. Though Presley was deeply committed to Christianity and knowledgeable about the Bible, he nonetheless tried constantly to comprehend and explain the dramatic changes in his life. Presley’s most frequently read books were those that offered religious and philosophical insight. The most influential were the Bible, Joseph Banner’s The Impersonal Life, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, Larry Geller’s Beyond the Himalayas, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Last Freedom, and the Madame Blavatsky’s translations of Voice of Silence and Leaves of Morya’s Garden. To help remember passages of importance or to cross-reference works or even to show approval or disapproval, Presley would underline, write, and/or fold the passages or pages. So strong was the influence of The Impersonal Life that Presley spent hours at a time discussing its meaning with personal friends and people he had just met, whether celebrities or excited fans. Presley would also give away copies of the book, often with his favorite passages underlined. The most frequently cited line was “Be still and know that you are

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Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeevich

God.” During the 1970s, Presley became increasingly interested in and highly influenced by numerology. He would often consult Cheiro’s Book of Numbers before making serious decisions and he would discuss it with anyone who was willing to listen.

Archives

Elvis Presley Library Archive at Graceland. Contains Presley’s large personal library.

Printed Sources

Esposito, Joe. Elvis: A Legendary Performance (Buena Park, Calif.: West Coast Publishing, 1990).

Guralnick, Peter. Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1999).

———. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997).

Hopkins, Jerry. Elvis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971).

Presley, Priscilla, with Sandra Harmon. Elvis and Me (New York: G.P. Putnum’s Sons, 1985).

Aaron N. Coleman

PROKOFIEV, SERGEI SERGEEVICH (1891–1953)

Sergei Prokofiev, the son of a landowner, was born in Sonzovka, southern Russia. At the age of 10 he composed his first opera, “The Giant,” and set the lyrics of the Russian poets Alexander Pushkin and Michail Lermontov to music. He studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (1904–9) and gave several concerts in France, England, Switzerland, and Italy before he left—after the October Revolution— Soviet Russia for the United States. Here he came into contact with the Christian Science movement of Mary Baker Eddy, and her seminal publication, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875). His tours through the United States in the 1920s and 1930s laid the foundation for his international fame. Prokofiev cooperated with the great orchestras in Chicago, Boston, and New York. Time and Newsweek praised him as Russia’s greatest modern composer. In 1929 Prokofiev moved with his family to Paris and seven years later he returned permanently back to the Soviet Union. In 1939 he became vice chairman of the Soviet Composers’ Union. During the war he had been evacuated like many other Soviet musicians to the Caucasus and Central Asia. In Alma-Aty (Kazakhstan) he worked together with film producer Sergei Eisenstein. In 1942 Prokofiev received the Stalin prize, in the next years the medal of the Red Workers’ Movement and of the Red Army. In June 1945 the Royal Philharmonic Society in London awarded him the golden medal. Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953, the same day that his mentor Stalin died.

In his youth, Prokofiev became acquainted with Goethe’s Faust, and he dreamt about setting it to music. As a youth, he appreciated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet. Due to his interest for Roman history, he also read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis. At the conservatory he had been attracted to the fantastic literature of Jules Verne (Voyage to the Moon). All these works Prokofiev read in the original languages. When Prokofiev later belonged to the Soviet music avant-garde, he was deeply influenced by Western symbolism, as he loved the poems of Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal). This explains why the composer was soon attracted by experimental music. Prokofiev’s work reflects the popularity

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of West European modernism in Russia, but without neglecting Russia’s own traditions. In his early period Prokofiev stood for a symbiosis between Western and Russian culture. Cultural policy under Lenin approved the Soviet artists’ affinity to Western influences and propagated a cultural pluralism. At the same time, when Prokofiev introduced his work to a Western audience, Western composers like Arnold Schönberg, Paul Hindemith, and Alban Berg gave concerts in the Soviet Union. This free exchange of cultural influences ended abruptly under Stalin. In 1936, during the Great Purges, Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union as a patriotic Russian, feeling that he could not get musical inspiration so far from his homeland. Under Stalin, Prokofiev enjoyed many privileges, and he was not sensitive to the deep changes in Soviet society when numerous artists vanished in the labor camps. Instead, Prokofiev cooperated with the regime. In contrast to his early experimental work in the 1920s influenced by Western modernism, in the following decades until his death in 1953 Prokofiev dedicated his music to the “socialist achievements” such as the October Revolution, industrialization, the Soviet constitution, and the victory in World War II and increasingly dissociated himself from Western influences.

Archives

Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury I Iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Litera-

ture and Arts), Moscow.

Printed Sources

Blok, Vladimir. Sergei Prokofiev: Materials, Articles, Interviews (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978).

Prokofiev, Oleg (ed.). Sergey Prokofiev 1891–1953. Soviet Diary, 1927, and Other Writings

(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).

Roberts, Peter Deane. Modernism in Russian Piano Music. Scriabin, Prokofiev, and Their Russian Contemporaries, 2 vols. (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).

Robinson, Harlow. The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev and Their Russian Literary Sources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

Eva-Maria Stolberg

PROUST, MARCEL (1871–1922)

Marcel Proust’s 16-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (1922–32) is regarded as one of the greatest achievements in world literature. Proust was born in Paris. He was raised as a Roman Catholic, the religion of his father, a professor of medicine. His mother kept the Jewish faith of her family. At her death, she advised Marcel, who as far as anyone could tell was not a believer, to remain a Catholic. During his final school year, Proust studied idealists such as Immanuel Kant. For Proust, his reading of Kant was inspirational, prompting speculations on metaphysics and human behavior.

Having completed his studies at the lycée Condorcet (1882–89) and after a year of military service, Proust continued his studies in law at the École des Sciences politiques and the Sorbonne. It was during this time that he began to develop his genius as a writer. He frequented Parisian literary salons where he met Anatole France, from whom he obtained a preface (1896) to his first novel, Les Plaisirs et les jours. He secluded himself in his apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, going

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out only in the darkest of night. The Prix Goncourt that he won in 1919 brought him national renown by a public that until then had scarcely heard of him. From 1919 his reputation increased both at home and abroad. Sick with asthma since childhood, Proust knew that his life would be short, but before his death he wanted to finish the enormous work that he had undertaken. On November 18, 1922, he died as a result of his condition that was worsened by bronchitis.

Until age 35, Proust lived a carefree life in the salons, although he worked for a brief period as a lawyer and was active in the Dreyfus Affair, like Émile Zola and other artists and intellectuals. He was financially independent and had the freedom to begin his great novel, Remembrance of Things Past, which was influenced by the autobiographies of François Chateaubriand and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Proust admired the works of Vigny, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle, but it was in Baudelaire’s poetry that he found the greatest inspiration. Many of Proust’s contemporaries cited Henri Bergson’s influence on Proust’s work, which Proust denied, although they both were much occupied with time and memory.

Proust’s entire work is written as an interior monologue and is semiautobiographical. His compact style has often put off readers who are unwilling to follow the labyrinths that he creates. To categorize his work as merely a memoir or a novel is to miss its central function. The importance of Proust’s novel lies both in the psychological development of its characters and in his philosophical obsession with time. In addition, Proust wrote the annals of his society: the aristocracy of late nineteenth-century France. It is a psychological portrait of the people that made up this society, which was marked by such feelings as love, jealousy, and truth. Proust examined his society under a microscope, and he gave a poetic dimension to the characters that he painted. The most famous of Proust’s essays is that on Flaubert’s style, in which he compares Flaubert’s grammatical use of tenses to Kant’s revolution in philosophy.

Archives

Le Centre de Recherche Kolb-Proust, Correspondence of Marcel Proust, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rare Book & Special Collections Library.

La Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France, Marcel Proust, Cabinet des Manuscrits.

Printed Sources

Carter, William C. Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Duchêne, Roger. L’Impossible Marcel Proust (Paris: R. Laffont, 1994).

Richard J. Gray II

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RAND, AYN (1905–1982)

Ayn Rand, born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, was an autodidact who taught herself to read at age six and began writing with professional aspirations by age nine. After graduating in 1924 from the University of Petrograd with majors in philosophy and history, Rand became disenchanted with the communist mindset taking over academia; she turned her attention toward Western films and plays and entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts, where she began to study screenwriting. By 1926, Rand departed from Russia and arrived in the United States, where she traveled from New York to Chicago and finally on to Hollywood where, after two days of standing in front of Cecil B. DeMille’s studio, she was offered a job as an extra and script reader for his movie The King of Kings. Alissa Rosenbaum then changed her name to Ayn Rand and met actor Frank O’Connor, whom she would marry in 1929. Rand’s first professional attempts at writing were failures— her first screenplay, Red Pawn, and stage play, Night of January 16th, as well as her first novel, We the Living (1933), were rejected most probably because Rand’s approach clashed with pro-communist culture during the period often labeled “the Red Decade.” Two years later Rand began writing The Fountainhead, a text that outlines her own spin on philosophy, known as objectivism, via Howard Roark, the ideal man and hero of the text. The Fountainhead appeared in 1943 after being rejected by 12 publishers and became a bestseller two years later just as Rand began working on a screenplay for the text. War delayed production of the film until 1948 and Rand shifted her focus back to novels, devoting most of her time to completing

Atlas Shrugged.

Rand’s main contribution is objectivism, a philosophy that was nascent in her mind as early as age eight when she encountered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children. Objectivists hold that there is no greater moral goal than achieving happiness via objective principles, including moral integrity, capitalism, limited government, and individualism; hence, Rand was greatly influenced by

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