Dictionary of Literary Influences

Welles, George Orson

Kant, Jean Lagneau, and Edmund Husserl. Spinoza, too, had a profound effect on her (Pétrement 1988, I, 91). For Weil, science, work, and social organization were aspects of the same problem. She believed that oppression was linked to the layman’s ignorance of higher mathematics and developed an educational program for the working class based on the Greek mathematical tradition (Pétrement 1988, II, 256–58). She admired the genius of Karl Marx, but her criticisms of aspects of his thought stem from reflections on both Homer and Plato. The Iliad and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom encouraged her to revise her pacifist ideals (Pétrement 1988, II, 190). Weil’s religious thought was not informed by the Western tradition alone. She was greatly touched by The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bha- gavad-Gita, and the Upanishads, long passages of which are quoted in her numerous notebooks and referred to in her later writings.

Archives

Fonds Simone Weil, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

Printed Sources

Cabaud, Jacques. L’expérience vécue de Simone Weil (Paris: Plon, 1957).

Perrin, J. M., and G. Thibon. Simone Weil telle que nous l’avons connue (Paris, La Colombe, 1952).

Pétrement, Simone. La Vie de Simone Weil, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1973).Translated as Simone Weil: A Life, Raymond Rosenthal (trans.), (New York: Random House, 1988).

Weil, Simone. Œuvres complètes, (Paris, Gallimard NRF, 1988– ). Some volumes still to appear.

Linda Ness

WELLES, GEORGE ORSON (1915–1985)

Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and early in life showed signs of genius. As a youth, he loved optical illusions and vaudeville. These loves later became strong influences in his movie productions, keeping him from being a fan of the “realistic” school of movie-making because he always enjoyed the director’s ability to craft a movie. On a trip to Ireland, Welles enjoyed his first professional stage work with the Gate Theatre of Dublin. Upon returning to America in the mid-1930s, he joined a road company and met John Houseman, which led to the subsequent creation of the New York Federal Theatre and the Mercury group, a socially conscious project to entertain and inform a mass public through revivals and adaptations of classics, reflecting the ideals of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Successful Mercury stage productions helped the group obtain a contract with CBS radio where Welles became famous as the voice of The Shadow and became even better known for his production of War of the Worlds in 1938, which guaranteed his going to Hollywood in a wave of publicity. Welles began work for RKO Studios and in 1941 he starred in, directed, produced, and cowrote his first movie, Citizen Kane. Innovative, original, and groundbreaking, Citizen Kane is generally considered the greatest movie ever made and garnered Welles his only Academy Award, which he shared for original screenplay. However, William Randolph Hearst tried to get the movie destroyed because it closely echoed his career and Kane was not a financial success. Coupled with the poor marketing of Welles’s next movie, The Magnificent Ambersons (which he directed but did not star in), and RKO’s loss of personnel who supported the Mercury group, Welles became

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branded as an outsider and individualist whose films were not commercial successes. All of Welles’s later pictures were created under contractual constraints not imposed on Citizen Kane, and he could not recapture the greatness he had achieved by the age of 26. Nevertheless, his later career was wide-ranging. He starred in such movies as The Third Man (1949) and A Man for All Seasons (1966), directed movies from Macbeth (1948) to The Trial (1962), and starred in and directed Touch of Evil (1958). In a career spanning four decades and over 30 years in both Europe and America, Welles directed 13 films, narrated 15 others, and starred in at least 55 in all.

Literary classics heavily influenced Welles over the course of his career. One of the most successful of his radio broadcasts was H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, after which Wells actually threatened to sue for the misuse of his novel. Welles also broadcast Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, Hamlet, and other classics for CBS Radio with the Mercury Theatre, and one of their most acclaimed and popular productions was an expressionist play of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Critics often consider Welles’s expressionistic MacBeth (1948) with Republic Pictures the most controversial Shakespeare production. As a transition figure between the medieval and modern worlds, Welles could associate with Shakespeare because of his boyhood years and the transition of the United States from an agricultural to an industrial society. A constant theme in his movies was a battle between the quest for power and a need for constraints in industrial society, nowhere better seen than in Welles’s first two movies, Kane and Ambersons. Ambersons was the film version of Booth Tarkington’s 1918 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel and depicted a midwestern town passing into the twentieth century while longing for the past. Welles’s European movies were never as artful as his American efforts because they took him out of his social context and away from the easy association he had with his selected subject matter. His views of the individual’s clash with the modern world are also seen in his admiration for Franz Kafka’s writings on modern sensibilities, present in his direction of Kafka’s The Trial. Also interested in social consciousness, Welles wrote his own editorial column for the New York Post in 1945 in which he expressed his growing anger that America felt a complacent moral superiority, as shown in John Hershey’s A Bell for Adano, and that more people needed to be aware of the Black race, as shown in Richard Wright’s Black Boy.

Archives

American Film Institute Archives: film and archival material.

Library of Congress, Film Archives, Washington, D.C.: film and archival material. Museum of Modern Art’s Film Study Center: stills, film, and archival material. Weissberger Collection at the University of Wisconsin, Madison: personal correspondence

and papers, archival material.

Printed Sources

Higham, Charles. The Films of Orson Welles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). McBride, Joseph. Orson Welles (New York: Viking Press, 1972).

Naremore, James. The Magic World of Orson Welles (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989).

Noble, Peter. The Fabulous Orson Welles (London: Hutchinson, 1956).

Welles, Orson. This Is Orson Welles: Orson Welles and Peter Bogdonavich (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).

Christopher C. Strangeman

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WHARTON, EDITH (1862–1937)

Edith Newbold Jones was born in Manhattan, New York. She was educated in her father’s “gentleman’s library” and by a governess. The first female writer to win the Pulitzer Prize (for The Age of Innocence, 1920), Wharton established her reputation as a premier novelist of manners with The House of Mirth (1905) and solidified it with a steady stream of critically and commercially successful novels and short stories, including Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913), and Summer (1917). Wharton, the grand dame of American letters for the first two decades of the twentieth century, achieved popular success in spite of her generally tragic point of view, which often focused on the profound frustrations of men and women crushed beneath the stultifying conventions of genteel society, especially the conventions of marriage and divorce. Even as she skewered the corrupt social values of America’s aristocracy, though, Wharton eulogized the passing age of gentility, chronicling the upper-class “Old New York” of the 1870s with both an artist’s and an anthropologist’s eye and, in so doing, making a convincing case for the preeminence of American literature in the new century.

Wharton’s greatest influence was undeniably Henry James (1843–1916), who was both her close friend and literary model, especially for her early work as the progenitor of psychological realism. Wharton strongly disagreed with claims that she was derivative of James, but she did admit in her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), that she “cannot think of herself apart from the influence” of James (Wharton 1934, 169). James was also an influence as a writer obsessed with technique, as was her friend Paul Bourget, with whom Wharton shared “profitable” discussions about style (Wharton 1934, 199). Backward Glance elaborates on the exact impact of many of Wharton’s influences, including Walter Berry, who is cited as a “guide” with great “influence” over each of Wharton’s “literary steps” (Wharton 1934, 112–15). Here also she notes the good taste of her friend and “literary advisor” Edward Burlingame, her editor at Scribner’s and thoughtful correspondent over Wharton’s revision process (Wharton 1934, 145). In The Writing of Fiction (1925), Wharton’s book on the craft of writing, the author places herself firmly within the tradition of literary realism and cites the influences of the great continental realists Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot, both of whom were technical virtuosos and profound psychological writers. Wharton’s praise of Balzac’s view of each character as “a product of particular material and social conditions” (Wharton 1925, 7) demonstrates the profundity of his and other realists’ influence on Wharton, who explored the often tragic implications of this quasi-determinism in nearly everything she wrote. It is only for the great psychological novelist Marcel Proust, however, that Wharton devotes an entire section of The Writing of Fiction. Wharton returns to Proust in A Backward Glance, observing that Proust had “a new mastery, a new vision, and a structural design as yet unintelligible” (Wharton 1934, 324). The realists, then, not only shaped Wharton’s appreciation of character, but of form.

Archives

Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven, Conn.: approximately 50,000 items including manuscripts, letters, photographs, and miscellaneous personal papers.

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Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. University of Texas at Austin: correspondence, primarily between Wharton and Morton Fullerton, 1907–31.

William Royal Tyler Collection. Dumbarton Oaks, Washtingon, D.C.: correspondence, diaries, and manuscripts, 1900–37.

Printed Sources

Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1985).

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934).

———. The Writing of Fiction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925).

Todd R. Robinson

WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH (1861–1947)

Alfred North Whitehead was born to Maria Sarah Buckmaster and Alfred Whitehead, a Church of England cleric of modest means. With a solidly Victorian upbringing, Alfred studied Latin and Greek with his father. As the last of four children, he was the “baby of the family.” The works of Dickens, Wordsworth, and Shelley were read to him. He received a first-rate education at Sherborne School in Dorsetshire. He achieved both academic and athletic success. Later, personal tragedies stemming from the Great War led to his own development of philosophical theism. Meanwhile at Trinity College, Cambridge University, his major was mathematics; he read widely in the humanities and classics and discussed literature and Kantian philosophy with his classmates. He belonged to “The Apostles,” an exclusive social and academic club. His undergraduate days were a success.

In 1890 he married Evelyn Willoughby Wade; they had three children, one of whom died in the Great War. Two major factors marked his career. First, he studied mathematics before turning to metaphysics, and second, he spent 25 years in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard.

For 30 years as student and tutor at Cambridge University, Whitehead investigated mathematics. With Bertrand Russell as coauthor, Whitehead published Principia Mathematic (1910–13). In 1910 he moved to London where, in time, he was at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Indicative of his influence on British education was his Introduction to Mathematics, commissioned by the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge. From 1919 to 1924 he led Goldsmith’s College, a teacher college. The Organization of Thought (1917) and The Aims of Education (1929) demonstrated his Victorian concern with the educational opportunities for the working class.

Whitehead was active in the Aristotelian Society from 1915 to 1924. Exchanging views with the leading philosophical minds in England prepared him for a wider American audience. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), and The Principles of Relativity were the results of this education.

Harvard University offered him a five-year contract to teach in the Department of Philosophy. The relationship lasted until his retirement in 1937. For a time, Whitehead’s influence extended in and outside the academy. In 1925, he published Science and the Modern World. His thesis was that the Copernican/Newtonian scientific revolution meant that many basic philosophical assumptions needed signifi-

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cant revision. Whitehead’s revisions came four years later in Process and Reality. Unfortunately, Whitehead’s text was filled with neologisms. He believed that a new philosophical language was necessary for a full understanding of his analysis. The result was interesting. Echoes of his interpretation can be found in the works of various thinkers. In a way, Process and Reality was for the philosophical profession while Science and the Modern World and Adventures in Ideas (1933) were more for the general reader.

Adventures in Ideas was multifaceted, like so much of Whitehead’s work. As well as a philosophy of civilization, the book used his metaphysical system in explaining the cultural desires of the modern age. He related philosophical concepts with particular historical developments, combining thought with human action and institutions. In the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution and democracy were deeply related in the process of existence.

Whitehead’s interest turned to philosophical theology in the late 1920s and 1930s. Religion in the Making (1926), Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), The Function of Reason (1929), and Modes of Thought (1938) influenced a wide array of writers, both Christian theologians and secularists.

Always retiring and shy, Whitehead’s thought did not spawn disciples or any organized school of thought. He believed that the development of an individual’s creative articulation of his own ideas was the important educational objective—not a scholarly dispute over details. Undoubtedly this attitude contributed to the decline of his influence after his death in 1947.

Archives

In accordance with Whitehead’s request, upon his death, the bulk of his papers were destroyed. The Center for Process Studies at the School of Theology in Claremont, California, maintains a research facility dealing with thought. The center also publishes the journal Process Studies and holds conferences dealing with various aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy.

Printed Sources

Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). First-rate history of Harvard’s Department of Philosophy, argues for a limited legacy from Whitehead.

Lowe, Victor. Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, 1990). As the biography, it has details of the varied influences on Whitehead’s life and thought.

———. Understanding Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962). Guides the interested reader through Whitehead’s metaphysics.

Schilpp, Paul A. (ed.). The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 2nd reprint ed. (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1951; LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1991). Includes a complete bibliography of his writings including an essay entitled “Autobiographical Note.”

Donald K. Pickens

WIESEL, ELIEZER (1928– )

Elie Wiesel, Romanian Jewish journalist, essayist, and novelist, was born in Sighet, Transylvania, on September 30, 1928. Wiesel’s early education, which focused upon his family’s Jewish religion, was interrupted when in 1945 his family

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was rounded up with other Romanian Jews and shipped to Auschwitz where his father, mother, and younger sister died. Following the death of his family, Wiesel was sent to camps at Buna, Buchenwald, and Gleiwitz but was liberated in 1946. Following his release from the French orphanage which had been his home from the end of World War II until 1948, Wiesel resumed his education by studying philosophy, psychology, and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. Wiesel’s writing career began as a journalist covering the birth of the new nation of Israel; however, he would neither write nor speak about his experiences in the concentration camps until the publication of his autobiographical novel Night in 1958. From that point on, he spent much of his writing life commenting upon the Holocaust and the inhumanity which lay behind it in such works as Dawn (1960), The Jews of Silence (1966), and One Generation After (1970). Wiesel is currently Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University and was awarded the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a writer and a human rights activist.

Wiesel discusses his love of reading in his autobiography All Rivers Run to the Sea (1995) and in a lengthy 1996 Academy of Achievement interview. Wiesel admits a lifelong propensity for reading and stories but contends that from his earliest memories, his most pronounced interest lay in the religious stories that arose in his Jewish family and in his early education. Most prominent of these early influences were the debates revolving around the Talmud and the Midrashic legends, which would become central in Wiesel’s Five Biblical Portraits (1981), and the mysteries of the Kabbala. However, his favorite Jewish stories were the Hasidic stories which he would retell in Souls of Fire (1971), especially those recounted by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. Central to all of Wiesel’s spiritual readings were the Old Testament stories of Isaac, Jacob, and Moses.

Following his release from the French orphanage in 1948 and during his matriculation at the Sorbonne (1948–51), Wiesel was introduced to French, American, and European literary classics by philosopher Gustave Wahl, even meeting Martin Buber, author of the influential I and Thou (1923) and voice of the Hassidic movement. While still a student, Wiesel began his venture in journalism. One of his early assignments was to interview French Catholic novelist and Nobel laureate François Mauriac, who would later write an introduction to Wiesel’s Night. Wiesel developed an appreciation for such writers as Albert Camus and his “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), André Malraux, and the voice of French existentialism, JeanPaul Sartre, creator of the existential portrait of Hell in No Exit (1944), all of whom are echoed in Wiesel’s own writing.

It was Czechoslovakian novelist Franz Kafka, author of The Metamorphosis (1912), that Wiesel sees being most closely associated with his work. According to Wiesel, he felt most associated with Kafka because of the way Kafka could move his readers with words that came across almost like prayers.

Archives

Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University. Contains manuscripts, correspondence, and various versions of Weisel’s work.

Printed Sources

Estess, Ted L. Elie Wiesel (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980).

Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

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———. Interview. The Hall of Public Services, Academy of Achievement, June 29, 1996. http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/wie0int-1, accesed October 26, 2003. Necessary for understanding Wiesel’s development through reading.

Tom Frazier

WILDER, THORNTON NIVEN (1897–1975)

Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He was raised in the New England Protestant tradition by his father, who was a devout Congregationalist, and his mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. He studied at Oberlin College (1915–17) and Yale University (1917–20) and received an M.A. in French literature from Princeton University (1924–25). Wilder taught French at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey (1921–28) but resigned following the success of his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), which won the Pulitzer Prize. He lectured at the University of Chicago (1930–36) and continued writing novels, such as

Heaven’s My Destination (1935) and The Ides of March (1948). However, he achieved his greatest fame as a playwright, with his dramas Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), both winning the Pulitzer Prize. During World War II he served in Africa and Europe as an officer with U.S. Air Corps Intelligence (1942–45) and afterward became the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (1950–51). His later works included the play The Matchmaker (1954) and the novel The Eighth Day (1967), which won the National Book Award.

At the start of his career, Wilder wrote, “The training for literature must be acquired by the artist alone, through the passionate assimilation of a few masterpieces” (Wilder 1928, xiv), and throughout his life he was inspired by his shifting enthusiasms for various authors. For example, his first novel, The Cabala (1926), shows the influence of Marcel Proust; his second, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, reveals his interest in Madame Marie de Sevigne, while his third, The Woman of Andros (1930), is based on Terence’s comedy The Andria (166 B.C.). Wilder was unapologetic about his indebtedness to earlier works, questioning “why this dependence on the art of the past . . . cannot be looked upon as a mode for the transmission of the real” (Harrison 1983, 303).

This pattern of changing literary influences is also apparent in his three most famous plays. He acknowledged that The Skin of Our Teeth was “deeply indebted to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake,” his literary passion of the moment (Wilder 1957, xiv). He adapted The Matchmaker from Johann Nestroy’s 1842 comedy Einen Jux will er sich machen; and in a letter to Gertrude Stein, he said of Our Town, “its third act is based on your ideas, as on great pillars” (Burns and Dydo 1996, 175). Indeed, Stein, with her belief in portraying eternal and universal human truths, had perhaps the most lasting influence on Wilder. The two were close friends for many years, and toward the end of his life he declared, “she took on the task of ‘putting me right’ as a writer. The works I wrote . . . may not reflect her influence on the surface; it is all the better for being internal” (Wilder 1965, 37).

Archives

Thornton Wilder Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.: correspondence, manuscripts, personal and business papers, printed materials, photographs, memorabilia, audio tapes.

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Printed Sources

Burns, Edward, and Ulla E. Dydo (eds.). The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder

(New Haven: Yale University, 1996).

Harrison, Gilbert. The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder (New Haven: Ticknor and Fields, 1983).

Wilder, Thornton. The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (New York: CowardMcCann, 1928).

———.Three Plays (New York: Harper, 1957).

———.Untitled article, Writer’s Digest, September 1965, 37.

Charles Trainor

WILHELM II (1859–1941)

Wilhelm II was German emperor and king of Prussia (1888–1918). Born in Berlin, he received his education through his rigid tutor Georg Ernst Hinzpeter at the gymnasium in Kassel (1873–77) and the University of Bonn (1877–79). The son of Crown Prince Friedrich (later Emperor Friedrich III) and the British princess Victoria, his acknowledged legacy is a vehement opposition to his parents’ liberal attitude in his attempt to form a “personal reign.” Soon after his accession to the throne in 1888 he fell foul of Bismarck. Wilhelm’s sociopolitical ambitions drove the chancellor into resigning in 1890, but Wilhelm quickly dropped his plans to reconcile the working classes as soon as he ran into court opposition. Wilhelm’s mostly constitutional conduct in political practice during an outwardly grand epoch in German history should not obscure the severe tensions within society marking his reign. The emperor’s impulsive character and delight in the military culminated in inconsiderate speeches that gave the impression of a despotic and bellicose inclination. The Daily Telegraph crisis of 1908 led Wilhelm to play a less prominent role in public affairs. During World War I he receded into the background and allowed his generals to direct the war’s conduct. After chancellor Prinz Max von Baden had announced the emperor’s abdication on his own initiative on November 9, 1918, Wilhelm sought asylum in The Netherlands.

Most of the time Wilhelm II showed little inclination toward serious reading. Nevertheless, he was exposed to a considerable range of literary thought through education and social contacts. In his intellectual heritage he drew from Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which he called “the greatest and most meaningful work” (Cecil 1989/96, 2: 56), memorizing long passages and reading excerpts to his courtiers. He appreciated Chamberlain’s pretension for the Germans to restore the Roman Empire and purge Christianity of the influence of the Jews. Chamberlain and Wilhelm engaged in frequent correspondence and shared a disdain for the alleged worship of mammon in AngloSaxon culture. Heinrich von Treitschke’s admiration of Prussia had influenced Wilhelm in his youth, but later the fiery historian fell from grace because he failed to adopt a reverential tone toward the throne. Wilhelm’s conviction that the navy was the decisive force in warfare can be traced back to his thorough reading and annotating of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Importance of Sea Power in History.

In his historical and theological worldview, Wilhelm repeatedly spoke of two traditions of revelation: one stemming from biblical sources, the other from sages, priests, and kings. Among the latter he liked to name Homer and Goethe as well as

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his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I. As his poet laureate Wilhelm II chose Ernst von Wildenbruch, whose patriotic poems and historical plays seldom rose above mediocrity. This was in accordance with the kaiser’s general denouncement of everything that even remotely savored of modernism or socialism.

Works immediately connected with his rule were of especial interest to Wilhelm in his exile. When he read the third volume of Bismarck’s reminiscences he took excited notes in the margins of every page. Taking criticism very hard, he occasionally burst into tears; among the most damaging were the memoirs of minister Zedlitz-Trützschler and of Wilhelm’s former instructor Ludwig Raschdau. Wilhelm found Tirpitz’s Politische Dokumente “perfectly outrageous” (Cecil 1989/96, 2: 309) and wrote an article attempting to correct the admiral’s account.

Archives

Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: among various pertinent collections the remnant of the Hohenzollern family archive.

Archiv des vormals regierenden preußischen Königshauses, Burg Hohenzollern: restricted access.

Rijksarchief, Utrecht: files from his exile.

Printed Sources

Cecil, Lamar. Wilhelm II, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989, 1996).

Röhl, John C. G. Wilhelm II. Die Jugend des Kaisers 1859–1888 (München: C.H. Beck, 1993).

———. Wilhelm II. Der Aufbau der Persönlichen Monarchie 1888–1900 (München: C.H. Beck, 2001).

Wilhelm II. Aus meinem Leben, 1859–1888 (Berlin, and Leipzig: K.F. Koehler 1927).

———. Ereignisse und Gestalten aus den Jahren 1878–1918 (Berlin and Leipzig: K.F. Koehler 1922).

Alexander Sedlmaier

WILLIAMS, THOMAS LANIER (1911–1983)

Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, to Edwina Dakin and Cornelius Coffin Williams. He briefly attended both the University of Missouri at Columbia and Washington University, Saint Louis, before graduating with a degree in English at the University of Iowa in 1937, moving to Chicago and then to New Orleans. At the age of 24, Williams’s first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, was produced in Memphis, an event that began his long and prolific artistic career. Compared to great writers of the romantic Southern Gothic tradition such as William Faulkner, Williams’s writing often captured intimate details of family life in the South. Much of Williams’s writing drew upon his family portrait for inspiration: a combination of revered grandparents, genteel mother, drunken father, favored younger brother Dakin, and mentally disturbed sister Rose highly influenced all of his writings.

Williams traveled extensively throughout his life writing fiction, plays, and poetry, living most of it in hotel rooms between publication paychecks, as noted in his letters to a friend, Donald Windham. Although much of his work obligated him to live in New York and his family obligated him to visit Saint Louis, Williams had a distaste for both cities and spent any free time he had in places such as Province-

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town, Key West, New Orleans, and parts of Mexico. Williams remained most famous for his plays that painted violent and sexual, and oftentimes depressing and disturbing, portraits of society, such as the two Pulitzer Prize–winning plays, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), as well as Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Orpheus Descending (1958), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958).

Besides modeling characters in his plays on autobiographical influences, Williams also notes his influences as English writer D. H. Lawrence, collaborating with Donald Windham on a one-act play about Lawrence’s life entitled I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (1951), as well as writing the play You Touched Me! (1947), based on Lawrence’s short story of the same name. Other influences include Russian physician and writer Anton Chekov, Swedish author August Strindberg, American playwright Eugene O’Neill, German poet and writer Rainer Maria Rilke, French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and American poet Hart Crane, whose work “The Broken Tower” appears as an epigraph to A Streetcar Named Desire. Another Crane epigraph appears in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Crane’s name is mentioned in the character dialogue of You Touched Me! The title of Williams 1961 play, Summer and Smoke, was also influenced by Crane’s poem, “Emblems of Conduct.” Crane remains the author of the only published volume of poems that stayed with Williams throughout his travels, The Collected Poems of Hart Crane (1933).

Archives

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin: primary manuscripts, letters, photos, miscellaneous papers.

Columbia University’s Rare Books and Manuscript Library, New York, New York: contents of Key West house.

Miscellaneous materials can be found at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Delaware, Newark; New York Public Library’s Theater Collection, New York.

Printed Sources

Fritscher, John J. “Love and Death in Tennessee Williams” (Ph.D. diss., Loyola University Library, 1967).

Hayman, Ronald. Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

Williams, Dakin, and Shepherd Mead. Tennessee Williams: An Intimate Biography (New York: Arbor House, 1983).

Windham, Donald. Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham 1940–1965 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977).

Jennifer Clary-Lemon

WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS (1883–1963)

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His English father was transplanted first to Saint Thomas and Santo Domingo and later to New Jersey. His mother was of Puerto Rican and French descent. Williams’s ethnic background was reflected in his education, which included the Château de Lancy school near Geneva and Horace Mann School in New York City. He received his degree from the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania and interned at the French Hospital in New York. He also studied pediatrics for a year in Leipzig.

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