The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (33 page)

The death of Proust's father in 1903 and of his mother in 1905 left him grief stricken and alone but financially independent and free to attempt his great novel. At least one early version was written in 1905–06. Another, begun in 1907, was laid aside in October 1908. This had itself been interrupted by a series of brilliant parodies—of Balzac, Flaubert, Renan, Saint-Simon, and others of Proust's favourite French authors—called “L'Affaire Lemoine” (published in
Le Figaro
), through which he endeavoured to purge his style of extraneous influences.
In January 1909 occurred the real-life incident of an involuntary revival of a childhood memory through the taste of tea and a rusk biscuit (which in his novel became madeleine cake); in July he began
À la recherche du temps perdu
.

He thought of marrying “a very young and delightful girl” whom he met at Cabourg, a seaside resort in Normandy that became the Balbec of his novel, where he spent summer holidays from 1907 to 1914. Instead, he retired from the world to write his novel, finishing the first draft in September 1912. The first volume,
Du côté de chez Swann
(
Swann's Way
), was refused by the best-selling publishers Fasquelle and Ollendorff and even by the intellectual
La Nouvelle Revue Française
, under the direction of the novelist André Gide, but was finally issued at the author's expense in November 1913 by the progressive young publisher Bernard Grasset and met with some success. Proust then planned only two further volumes, the premature appearance of which was fortunately thwarted by his anguish at the flight and death of his secretary Alfred Agostinelli and by the outbreak of World War I.

During the war he revised the remainder of his novel, enriching and deepening its feeling, texture, and construction, increasing the realistic and satirical elements, and tripling its length. In this majestic process he transformed a work that in its earlier state was still below the level of his highest powers into one of the greatest achievements of the modern novel. In June 1919
À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
(
Within a Budding Grove
) was published simultaneously with a reprint of
Swann
and with
Pastiches et mélanges
, a miscellaneous volume containing “L'Affaire Lemoine” and other works. In December 1919, through Léon Daudet's recommendation,
À l'ombre
received the Prix Goncourt, and Proust suddenly became world famous. Three more installments appeared in his lifetime, with the benefit of his final revision, comprising
Le Côté de
Guermantes
(1920–21;
The Guermantes Way
) and
Sodome et Gomorrhe
(1921–22;
Sodom and Gomorrah
).

Proust died in Paris of pneumonia, succumbing to a weakness of the lungs that many had mistaken for a form of hypochondria and struggling to the last with the revision of
La Prisonnière
(
The Captive
). The last three parts of
À la recherche
were published posthumously, in an advanced but not final stage of revision:
La Prisonnière
(1923),
Albertine disparue
(1925;
The Fugitive
), and
Le Temps retrouvé
(1927;
Time Regained
). The novel remains one of the supreme achievements of modern fiction.

(b. March 26, 1874, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.—d. Jan. 29, 1963, Boston, Mass.)

T
he American poet Robert Frost was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations.

Frost attended Dartmouth College and continued to labour on the poetic career he had begun in a small way during high school; he first achieved professional publication in 1894 when
The Independent
, a weekly literary journal, printed his poem
My Butterfly: An Elegy
. Impatient with academic routine, Frost left Dartmouth after less than a year and married. The young poet supported his wife, Elinor, by teaching school and farming, neither with notable success. Frost resumed his college education at Harvard University in 1897 but left after two years' study there. From 1900 to 1909 the family raised poultry on a farm near Derry, New Hampshire, and for a time Frost also taught. He became an enthusiastic botanist and acquired his poetic persona of a New England rural sage during the years he and his family spent at Derry. All this while he was
writing poems, but publishing outlets showed little interest in them.

By 1911 Frost was fighting against discouragement. Poetry had always been considered a young person's game, but Frost, who was nearly 40 years old, had not published a single book of poems and had seen just a handful appear in magazines. In 1911 ownership of the Derry farm passed to Frost. A momentous decision was made: to sell the farm and use the proceeds to make a radical new start in London, where publishers were perceived to be more receptive to new talent. Accordingly, in August 1912 the Frost family sailed across the Atlantic to England. Frost carried with him sheaves of verses he had written but not gotten into print. English publishers in London did indeed prove more receptive to innovative verse, and, through his own vigorous efforts and those of the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound, Frost within a year had published
A Boy's Will
(1913). From this first book, such poems as
Storm Fear
,
Mowing
, and
The Tuft of Flowers
have remained standard anthology pieces.

A Boy's Will
was followed in 1914 by a second collection,
North of Boston
, that introduced some of the most popular poems in all of Frost's work, among them
Mending Wall
,
The Death of the Hired Man
,
Home Burial
, and
After Apple-Picking
. In London, Frost's name was frequently mentioned by those who followed the course of modern literature, and soon American visitors were returning home with news of this unknown poet who was causing a sensation abroad.

The outbreak of World War I brought the Frosts back to the United States in 1915. By then the Boston poet Amy Lowell's review had already appeared in
The New Republic
, and writers and publishers throughout the Northeast were aware that a writer of unusual abilities stood in their midst. The American publishing house of Henry Holt had
brought out its edition of
North of Boston
in 1914. It became a best-seller, and, by the time the Frost family landed in Boston, Holt was adding the American edition of
A Boy's Will
. Frost soon found himself besieged by magazines seeking to publish his poems. Never before had an American poet achieved such rapid fame after such a disheartening delay. From this moment his career rose on an ascending curve.

Frost bought a small farm at Franconia, New Hampshire, in 1915, but his income from both poetry and farming proved inadequate to support his family, and so he lectured and taught part-time at Amherst College and at the University of Michigan from 1916 to 1938. Any remaining doubt about his poetic abilities was dispelled by the collection
Mountain Interval
(1916), which continued the high level established by his first books. His reputation was further enhanced by
New Hampshire
(1923), which received the Pulitzer Prize. That prize was also awarded to Frost's
Collected Poems
(1930) and to the collections
A Further Range
(1936) and
A Witness Tree
(1942). Frost served as a poet-in-residence at Harvard (1939–43), Dartmouth (1943–49), and Amherst College (1949–63), and in his old age he gathered honours and awards from every quarter. He was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1958–59), and he recited his poem
The Gift Outright
at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961.

(b. June 6, 1875, Lübeck, Ger.—d. Aug. 12, 1955, near Zürich, Switz.)

T
homas Mann was a German novelist and essayist whose early novels—
Buddenbrooks
(1900),
Der Tod in Venedig
(1912;
Death in Venice
), and
Der Zauberberg
(1924;
The Magic Mountain
)—earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

After perfunctory work in Munich in an insurance office and on the editorial staff of
Simplicissimus
, a satirical weekly, Mann devoted himself to writing. His early tales, collected as
Der kleine Herr Friedemann
(1898), reflect the aestheticism of the 1890s but are given depth by the influence of the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the composer Wagner, to all of whom Mann was always to acknowledge a deep, if ambiguous, debt.

In his first novel,
Buddenbrooks
, Mann built the story of the family and its business house over four generations, showing how an artistic streak not only unfits the family's later members for the practicalities of business life but undermines their vitality as well. But, almost against his will, Mann also wrote a tender elegy for the old bourgeois virtues.

The outbreak of World War I evoked Mann's ardent patriotism and awoke, too, an awareness of the artist's social commitment. In 1918 he published a large political treatise,
Reflections of an Unpolitical Man
, in which all his ingenuity of mind was summoned to justify the authoritarian state as against democracy, creative irrationalism as against “flat” rationalism, and inward culture as against moralistic civilization. This work belongs to the tradition of “revolutionary conservatism” that leads from the 19th-century German nationalistic and antidemocratic thinkers Paul Anton de Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the apostle of the superiority of the “Germanic” race, toward National Socialism; and Mann later was to repudiate these ideas.

With the establishment of the German (Weimar) Republic in 1919, Mann slowly revised his outlook. His new position was clarified in the novel
The Magic Mountain
. Its theme grows out of an earlier motif: a young engineer, Hans Castorp, visiting a cousin in a sanatorium in Davos, abandons practical life to submit to the rich seductions
of disease, inwardness, and death. But the sanatorium comes to be the spiritual reflection of the possibilities and dangers of the actual world. In the end, somewhat skeptically but humanely, Castorp decides for life and service to his people.

From this time onward Mann's imaginative effort was directed to the novel. His literary and cultural essays began to play an ever-growing part in elucidating and communicating his awareness of the fragility of humaneness, tolerance, and reason in the face of political crisis. In 1930 he gave a courageous address in Berlin, “Ein Appell an die Vernunft” (“An Appeal to Reason”), appealing for the formation of a common front of the cultured bourgeoisie and the socialist working class against the inhuman fanaticism of the National Socialists. In essays and on lecture tours in Germany, to Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Amsterdam, and elsewhere during the 1930s, Mann, while steadfastly attacking Nazi policy, often expressed sympathy with socialist and communist principles in the very general sense that they were the guarantee of humanism and freedom.

When Hitler became chancellor early in 1933, Mann and his wife, on holiday in Switzerland, were warned by their son and daughter in Munich not to return. For some years his home was in Switzerland, near Zürich, but he traveled widely, visiting the United States on lecture tours and finally, in 1938, settling there. In 1936 he was deprived of his German citizenship; in the same year the University of Bonn took away the honorary doctorate it had bestowed in 1919 (it was restored in 1949). From 1936 to 1944 Mann was a citizen of Czechoslovakia. In 1944 he became a U.S. citizen. After the war, he refused to return to Germany to live. In 1952 he settled again near Zürich.

The novels on which Mann was working throughout this period of exile reflect variously the cultural crisis of his times. In
Doktor Faustus
, begun in 1943 at the darkest
period of the war, Mann wrote the most directly political of his novels. It is the life story of a German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, born in 1885, who dies in 1940 after 10 years of mental alienation. A solitary, estranged figure, he “speaks” the experience of his times in his music, and the story of Leverkühn's compositions is that of German culture in the two decades before 1930—more specifically of the collapse of traditional humanism and the victory of the mixture of sophisticated nihilism and barbaric primitivism that undermine it.

The composition of the novel was fully documented by Mann in 1949 in
The Genesis of a Novel. Doktor Faustus
exhausted him as no other work of his had done, and
The Holy Sinner
and
The Black Swan
, published in 1951 and 1953, respectively, show a relaxation of intensity in spite of their accomplished, even virtuoso style.

Mann's style is finely wrought and full of resources, enriched by humour, irony, and parody; his composition is subtle and many-layered, brilliantly realistic on one level and yet reaching to deeper levels of symbolism.

(b. Sept. 25, 1881, Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, China—d. Oct. 19, 1936, Shanghai)

L
u Xun, which is the pen name of Zhou Shuren, was a Chinese writer commonly considered the greatest in 20th-century Chinese literature. He was also an important critic known for his sharp and unique essays on the historical traditions and modern conditions of China.

Born to a family that was traditional, wealthy, and esteemed (his grandfather had been a government official in Beijing), Zhou Shuren had a happy childhood. In 1893, however, his grandfather was sentenced to prison for examination fraud, and his father became bedridden. The
family's reputation declined, and they were treated with disdain by their community and relatives. This experience is thought to have had a great influence on his writing, which was marked by sensitivity and pessimism.