The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (36 page)

The two men became acquainted while Kafka was studying law at the University of Prague. He received his doctorate in 1906, and in 1907 he took up regular employment with an insurance company. The long hours and exacting requirements of the Assicurazioni Generali, however, did not permit Kafka to devote himself to writing. In 1908 he found in Prague a job in the seminationalized Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. There he remained until 1917, when tuberculosis forced him to take intermittent sick leaves and, finally, to retire (with a pension) in 1922, about two years before
he died. In his job he was considered tireless and ambitious; he soon became the right hand of his boss, and he was esteemed and liked by all who worked with him.

Generally speaking, Kafka was a charming, intelligent, and humorous individual, but he found his routine office job and the exhausting double life into which it forced him (for his nights were frequently consumed in writing) to be excruciating torture, and his deeper personal relationships were neurotically disturbed. The conflicting inclinations of his complex and ambivalent personality found expression in his sexual relationships. His health was poor and office work exhausted him. In 1917 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and from then onward he spent frequent periods in sanatoriums.

In 1923 Kafka went to Berlin to devote himself to writing. During a vacation on the Baltic coast later that year, he met Dora Dymant (Diamant), a young Jewish socialist. The couple lived in Berlin until Kafka's health significantly worsened during the spring of 1924. After a brief final stay in Prague, where Dymant joined him, he died of tuberculosis in a clinic near Vienna.

Sought out by leading avant-garde publishers, Kafka reluctantly published a few of his writings during his lifetime. These publications include, among others, works representative of Kafka's maturity as an artist—
The Judgment
, a long story written in 1912; two further long stories,
Die Verwandlung
(1915;
Metamorphosis
) and
In der Strafkolonie
(1919;
In the Penal Colony
); and a collection of short prose,
Ein Landarzt
(1919;
A Country Doctor
).
Ein Hungerkünstler
(1924;
A Hunger Artist
), four stories exhibiting the concision and lucidity characteristic of Kafka's late style, had been prepared by the author but did not appear until after his death.

In fact, misgivings about his work caused Kafka before his death to request that all of his unpublished manuscripts
be destroyed; his literary executor, Max Brod, disregarded his instructions. Brod published the novels
The Trial
,
The Castle
, and
Amerika
in 1925, 1926, and 1927, respectively, and a collection of shorter pieces,
Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer
(
The Great Wall of China
), in 1931.

Many of Kafka's fables contain an inscrutable, baffling mixture of the normal and the fantastic, though occasionally the strangeness may be understood as the outcome of a literary or verbal device, as when the delusions of a pathological state are given the status of reality or when the metaphor of a common figure of speech is taken literally. Thus in
The Judgment
a son unquestioningly commits suicide at the behest of his aged father. In
The Metamorphosis
the son wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous and repulsive insect; he slowly dies, not only because of his family's shame and its neglect of him but because of his own guilty despair.

Many of the tales are even more unfathomable.
In the Penal Colony
presents an officer who demonstrates his devotion to duty by submitting himself to the appalling (and clinically described) mutilations of his own instrument of torture. This theme, the ambiguity of a task's value and the horror of devotion to it—one of Kafka's constant preoccupations—appears again in
A Hunger Artist
. Many of the motifs in the short fables also recur in the novels.

Kafka's stories and novels have provoked a wealth of interpretations. Brod and Kafka's foremost English translators, Willa and Edwin Muir, viewed the novels as allegories of divine grace. Existentialists have seen Kafka's environment of guilt and despair as the ground upon which to construct an authentic existence. Some have seen his neurotic involvement with his father as the heart of his work; others have emphasized the social criticism, the inhumanity of the powerful and their agents, the violence and barbarity that lurk beneath normal routine. Some
have found an imaginative anticipation of totalitarianism in the random and faceless bureaucratic terror of
The Trial
. There is evidence in both the works and the diaries for each of these interpretations, but Kafka's work as a whole transcends them all.

(b. Sept. 26, 1888, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.—d. Jan. 4, 1965, London, Eng.)

T
homas Sterns Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor who was a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as
The Waste Land
(1922) and
Four Quartets
(1943). His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. In 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Eliot entered Harvard in 1906 and received a B.A. in 1909. He spent the year 1910–11 in France, attending Henri Bergson's lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne and reading poetry with Alain-Fournier. From 1911 to 1914 he was back at Harvard reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit. By 1916 he had finished, in Europe, a dissertation entitled
Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley
. But World War I had intervened, and he never returned to Harvard to take the final oral examination for the Ph.D. degree.

Eliot was to pursue four careers: editor, dramatist, literary critic, and philosophical poet. His first important publication, and the first masterpiece of “Modernism” in English, was
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
. It represented a break with the immediate past as radical as that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in
Lyrical Ballads
(1798). From the appearance of Eliot's first
volume,
Prufrock and Other Observations
, in 1917, one may conveniently date the maturity of the 20th-century poetic revolution.

For a year Eliot taught French and Latin at the Highgate School; in 1917 he began his brief career as a bank clerk in Lloyds Bank Ltd. Meanwhile he was also a prolific reviewer and essayist in both literary criticism and technical philosophy. In 1919 he published
Poems
, which contained the poem
Gerontion
, a meditative interior monologue in blank verse: nothing like this poem had appeared in English.

With the publication in 1922 of his poem
The Waste Land
, Eliot won an international reputation.
The Waste Land
expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of vignettes, loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption.
The Waste Land
showed him to be, in addition, a metrist of great virtuosity, capable of astonishing modulations ranging from the sublime to the conversational.

Consciously intended or not, Eliot's criticism created an atmosphere in which his own poetry could be better understood and appreciated than if it had to appear in a literary milieu dominated by the standards of the preceding age. In the essay
Tradition and the Individual Talent
, appearing in his first critical volume,
The Sacred Wood
(1920), Eliot asserts that tradition, as used by the poet, is not a mere repetition of the work of the immediate past; rather, it comprises the whole of European literature from Homer to the present. The poet writing in English may therefore make his own tradition by using materials from any past period, in any language.

Two other essays almost complete the Eliot critical canon:
The Metaphysical Poets
and
Andrew Marvell
, published
in
Selected Essays, 1917–32
(1932). In these essays he effects a new historical perspective on the hierarchy of English poetry, putting at the top Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the 17th century and lowering poets of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Eliot was confirmed in the Church of England (1927); in that year he also became a British subject. The first long poem after his conversion was
Ash Wednesday
(1930), a religious meditation in a style entirely different from that of any of the earlier poems. This and subsequent poems were written in a more relaxed, musical, and meditative style than his earlier works.

Eliot's masterpiece is
Four Quartets
, which was issued as a book in 1943. This work made a deep impression on the reading public, and even those who were unable to accept the poems' Christian beliefs recognized the intellectual integrity with which Eliot pursued his high theme, the originality of the form he had devised, and the technical mastery of his verse. This work led to the award to Eliot, in 1948, of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Eliot's plays, which begin with
Sweeney Agonistes
(published 1926; first performed in 1934) and end with
The Elder Statesman
(first performed 1958; published 1959), are, with the exception of
Murder in the Cathedral
(published and performed 1935), inferior to the lyric and meditative poetry. All his plays are in a blank verse of his own invention; thus he brought “poetic drama” back to the popular stage.
The Family Reunion
(1939) and
Murder in the Cathedral
are Christian tragedies, the former a tragedy of revenge, the latter of the sin of pride.
Murder in the Cathedral
is a modern miracle play on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket.

After World War II, Eliot returned to writing plays with several comedies derived from Greek drama. Eliot's career as editor was ancillary to his main interests, but his
quarterly review,
The Criterion
(1922–39), was the most distinguished international critical journal of the period. He was a “director,” or working editor, of the publishing firm of Faber & Faber Ltd. from the early 1920s until his death.

From the 1920s onward, Eliot's influence as a poet and as a critic—in both Great Britain and the United States—was immense. Since his death, interpreters have been markedly more critical, focusing on his complex relationship to his American origins, his elitist cultural and social views, and his exclusivist notions of tradition and of race.

(b. Oct. 16, 1888, New York, N.Y., U.S.—d. Nov. 27, 1953, Boston, Mass.)

E
ugene O'Neill was a foremost American dramatist of the 20th century and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.

O'Neill, who was born in a hotel and whose father was a touring actor, spent his early childhood in hotel rooms, on trains, and backstage. He was educated at boarding schools, and he attended Princeton University for one year (1906–07), after which he left school to begin what he later regarded as his real education in “life experience.” He shipped to sea, lived a derelict's existence on the waterfronts of Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New York City, submerged himself in alcohol, and attempted suicide. Recovering briefly at the age of 24, he held a job for a few months as a reporter and contributor to the poetry column of the
New London Telegraph
but soon came down with tuberculosis. Confined to the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium in Wallingford, Conn., for six months (1912–13), he confronted himself soberly and nakedly for the first time and seized the chance for what he later called his “rebirth.” He began to write plays.

O'Neill's first appearance as a playwright came in the summer of 1916, in the quiet fishing village of Provincetown, Mass., where a group of young writers and painters had launched an experimental theatre. In their tiny, ramshackle playhouse on a wharf, they produced his one-act sea play
Bound East for Cardiff
. The talent inherent in the play was immediately evident to the group, which that fall formed the Playwrights' Theater in Greenwich Village. Their first bill, on Nov. 3, 1916, included
Bound East for Cardiff
—O'Neill's New York debut. Although he was only one of several writers whose plays were produced by the Playwrights' Theater, his contribution within the next few years made the group's reputation. By the time his first full-length play,
Beyond the Horizon
, was produced on Broadway, Feb. 2, 1920, at the Morosco Theater, the young playwright already had a small reputation.

Beyond the Horizon
impressed the critics with its tragic realism, won for O'Neill the first of four Pulitzer prizes in drama—others were for
Anna Christie
,
Strange Interlude
, and
Long Day's Journey into Night
—and brought him to the attention of a wider theatre public. For the next 20 years his reputation grew steadily, both in the United States and abroad; after Shakespeare and Shaw, O'Neill became the most widely translated and produced dramatist.

O'Neill's capacity for and commitment to work were staggering. Between 1920 and 1943 he completed 20 long plays—several of them double and triple length—and a number of shorter ones. He wrote and rewrote many of his manuscripts half a dozen times before he was satisfied. His most-distinguished short plays include the four early sea plays,
Bound East for Cardiff
,
In the Zone
,
The Long Voyage Home
, and
The Moon of the Caribbees
, which were written between 1913 and 1917 and produced in 1924 under the overall title
S.S. Glencairn
;
The Emperor Jones
(1920; about the disintegration of a Pullman porter turned tropicalisland
dictator); and
The Hairy Ape
(1922; about the disintegration of a displaced steamship coal stoker).
Desire Under the Elms
(1924),
The Great God Brown
(1926),
Strange Interlude
(1928),
Mourning Becomes Electra
(1931), and
The Iceman Cometh
(1946) are among his important long plays.
Ah, Wilderness!
(1933) was his only comedy.