The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (37 page)

O'Neill's plays were written from an intensely personal point of view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of his family's tragic relationships—his mother and father, who loved and tormented each other; his older brother, who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age; and O'Neill himself, caught and torn between love for and rage at all three.

O'Neill's final years were spent in grim frustration. Unable to work, he longed for his death and sat waiting for it in a Boston hotel, seeing no one except his doctor, a nurse, and his third wife. O'Neill died as broken and tragic a figure as any he had created for the stage. He was the first American dramatist to regard the stage as a literary medium and the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through his efforts, the American theatre grew up during the 1920s, developing into a cultural medium that could take its place with the best in American fiction, painting, and music.

(b. June 11 [June 23, New Style], 1889, Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire—d. March 5, 1966, Domodedovo, near Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.)

T
he Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (the pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko) was recognized at her death as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature.

Akhmatova began writing verse at age 11 and at 21 joined a group of St. Petersburg poets, the Acmeists. To
their program of concrete representation and precise form and meaning Akhmatova added her own stamp of elegant colloquialism and the psychological sophistication of a young cosmopolitan woman, fully in control of the subtle verbal and gestural vocabulary of modern intimacies and romance. Her first collections,
Vecher
(1912; “Evening”) and
Chyotki
(1914; “Rosary”), especially the latter, brought her fame and made her poetic voice emblematic of the experience of her generation.

During World War I and following the Revolution of 1917, she added to her main theme some civic, patriotic,
and religious motifs but did not sacrifice her personal intensity or artistic conscience. Her artistry and increasing control of her medium were particularly prominent in her next collections:
Belaya staya
(1917; “The White Flock”),
Podorozhnik
(1921; “Plantain”), and
Anno Domini MCMXXI
(1921). The broadening of her thematic range, however, did not prevent the communist cultural watchdogs from proclaiming her “bourgeois and aristocratic” and condemning her poetry for its narrow preoccupation with love and God. In 1923 she entered a period of almost complete poetic silence and literary ostracism, and no volume of her poetry appeared in the Soviet Union until 1940. In September 1941, following the German invasion, Akhmatova was permitted to deliver an inspiring radio address to the women of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Evacuated to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, soon thereafter, she read her poems to hospitalized soldiers and published a number of war-inspired poems; a small volume of selected poetry appeared in Tashkent in 1943. At the end of the war she returned to Leningrad, where her poems began to appear in local magazines and newspapers. She gave poetic readings, and plans were made for publication of a large edition of her works.

In August 1946, however, she was harshly denounced by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference.” She was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers; an unreleased book of her poems, already in print, was destroyed; and none of her work appeared in print for three years.

Then, in 1950, a number of her poems eulogizing Stalin and Soviet communism were printed in several issues of the illustrated weekly magazine
Ogonyok
(“The Little Light”) under the title
Iz tsikla “Slava miru”
(“From the Cycle ‘Glory to Peace'”). This uncharacteristic capitulation to the Soviet dictator was motivated by Akhmatova's
desire to propitiate Stalin and win the freedom of her son, who had been arrested in 1949 and exiled to Siberia. The tone of these poems (those glorifying Stalin were omitted from Soviet editions of Akhmatova's works published after his death) is far different from the moving and universalized lyrical cycle,
Rekviem
(“Requiem”), composed between 1935 and 1940 and occasioned by Akhmatova's grief over an earlier arrest and imprisonment of her son in 1938. This masterpiece—a poetic monument to the sufferings of the Soviet people during Stalin's terror—was published in Russia for the first time in 1989.

Akhmatova's longest work and perhaps her masterpiece,
Poema bez geroya
(“Poem Without a Hero”), on which she worked from 1940 to 1962, was not published in the Soviet Union until 1976. This difficult and complex work, in which the life of St. Petersburg bohemia in pre–World War I years is “double-exposed” onto the tragedies and suffering of the post-1917 decades, is a powerful lyric summation of Akhmatova's philosophy and her own definitive statement on the meaning of her life and poetic achievement.

In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize, an international poetry prize awarded in Italy, and in 1965 she received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. Her journeys to Sicily and England to receive these honours were her first travel outside her homeland since 1912.

(b. Sept. 25, 1897, New Albany, Miss., U.S.—d. July 6, 1962, Byhalia, Miss.)

W
illiam Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.

A reluctant student, Faulkner left high school in Oxford, Miss., without graduating but devoted himself to “undirected reading.” In July 1918, impelled by dreams of martial glory and by despair at a broken love affair, Faulkner joined the British Royal Air Force (RAF) as a cadet pilot under training in Canada, although the November 1918 armistice intervened before he could finish ground school, let alone fly or reach Europe. After returning home, he enrolled for a few university courses, published poems and drawings in campus newspapers, and acted out a self-dramatizing role as a poet who had seen wartime service.

His first novel,
Soldiers' Pay
(1926), given a Southern though not a Mississippian setting, was an impressive achievement, stylistically ambitious and strongly evocative of the sense of alienation experienced by soldiers returning from World War I to a civilian world of which they seemed no longer a part. Back in Oxford—with occasional visits to Pascagoula on the Gulf Coast—Faulkner again worked at a series of temporary jobs but was chiefly concerned with proving himself as a professional writer. None of his short stories was accepted, however, and he was especially shaken by his difficulty in finding a publisher for
Flags in the Dust
(published posthumously, 1973), a long, leisurely novel, drawing extensively on local observation and his own family history, that he had confidently counted upon to establish his reputation and career. When the novel eventually did appear, severely truncated, as
Sartoris
in 1929, it created in print for the first time that densely imagined world of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County—based partly on Ripley but chiefly on Oxford and Lafayette county and characterized by frequent recurrences of the same characters, places, and themes—which Faulkner was to use as the setting for so many subsequent novels and stories.

In
The Sound and the Fury
(1929), his first major novel, he combined a Yoknapatawpha setting with radical technical experimentation. In successive “stream-of-consciousness” monologues the three brothers of Candace (Caddy) Compson—Benjy the idiot, Quentin the disturbed Harvard undergraduate, and Jason the embittered local businessman—expose their differing obsessions with their sister and their loveless relationships with their parents. A fourth section, narrated as if authorially, provides new perspectives on some of the central characters, including Dilsey, the Compsons' black servant, and moves toward a powerful yet essentially unresolved conclusion. Faulkner's next novel, the brilliant tragicomedy called
As I Lay Dying
(1930), is centred upon the conflicts within the “poor white” Bundren family as it makes its slow and difficult way to Jefferson to bury its matriarch's malodorously decaying corpse. Entirely narrated by the various Bundrens and people encountered on their journey, it is the most systematically multi-voiced of Faulkner's novels and marks the culmination of his early post-Joycean experimentalism.

Absalom, Absalom!
(1936) was Faulkner's next major novel. Because this profoundly Southern story is constructed—speculatively, conflictingly, and inconclusively—by a series of narrators with sharply divergent self-interested perspectives,
Absalom, Absalom!
is often seen, in its infinite open-endedness, as Faulkner's supreme “modernist” fiction, focused above all on the processes of its own telling.

Other novels followed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but Faulkner's American reputation—which had always lagged well behind his reputation in Europe—was boosted by
The Portable Faulkner
(1946), an anthology skillfully edited by Malcolm Cowley in accordance with the arresting if questionable thesis that Faulkner was deliberately constructing a historically based “legend” of the South.
Faulkner's
Collected Stories
(1950), impressive in both quantity and quality, was also well received, and later in 1950 the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature catapulted the author instantly to the peak of world fame and enabled him to affirm, in a famous acceptance speech, his belief in the survival of the human race, even in an atomic age, and in the importance of the artist to that survival.

The Nobel Prize had a major impact on Faulkner's private life. Confident now of his reputation and future sales, he became less consistently “driven” as a writer than in earlier years and allowed himself more personal freedom, drinking heavily at times and indulging in a number of extramarital affairs—his opportunities in these directions being considerably enhanced by several overseas trips (most notably to Japan in 1955) undertaken on behalf of the U.S. State Department. He took his “ambassadorial” duties seriously, speaking frequently in public and to interviewers, and also became politically active at home, taking positions on major racial issues in the vain hope of finding middle ground between entrenched Southern conservatives and interventionist Northern liberals.

The quality of Faulkner's writing is often said to have declined in the wake of the Nobel Prize, although
Requiem for a Nun
(1951) and
A Fable
(1954) suggest otherwise. He died of a heart attack in July 1962, at the age of 64, his health undermined by his drinking and by too many falls from horses too big for him.

(b. April 22, 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia—d. July 2, 1977, Montreux, Switz.)

V
ladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian-born American novelist and critic, the foremost of the
post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including
Lolita
(1955), feature stylish, intricate literary effects.

Nabokov was born into an old aristocratic family. In 1922, after the family had settled in Berlin, Nabokov's father was assassinated by a reactionary rightist while shielding another man at a public meeting. Nabokov published two collections of verse,
Poems
(1916) and
Two Paths
(1918), before leaving Russia in 1919. He and his family eventually made their way to England, and he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship provided for the sons of prominent Russians in exile. While at Cambridge he first studied zoology but soon switched to French and Russian literature; he graduated with first-class honours in 1922. While still in England he continued to write poetry, mainly in Russian but also in English, and two collections of his Russian poetry,
The Cluster
and
The Empyrean Path
, appeared in 1923.

Between 1922 and 1940, Nabokov lived in Germany and France. By 1925 he settled upon prose as his main genre. His first short story had already been published in Berlin in 1924. His first novel, the autobiographical
Mashenka
(
Mary
), appeared in 1926; his second novel,
King, Queen, Knave
, which appeared in 1928, marked his turn to a highly stylized form that characterized his art thereafter.

During his years of European emigration, Nabokov lived in a state of happy and continual semipenury. All of his Russian novels were published in very small editions in Berlin and Paris. His first two novels had German translations, and the money he obtained for them he used for butterfly-hunting expeditions (he eventually published 18 scientific papers on entomology). But until his best-seller
Lolita
, no book he wrote in Russian or English produced more than a few hundred dollars. During the period in
which he wrote his first eight novels, he made his living in Berlin and later in Paris by giving lessons in tennis, Russian, and English and from occasional walk-on parts in films. Even after great wealth came to him with the success of
Lolita
and the subsequent interest in his previous work, Nabokov and his family (he and his wife had one son, Dmitri) chose to live (from 1959) in genteelly shabby quarters in a Swiss hotel.