Into the Wild...McCandless’ Literary Influences???

It is known that McCandless was influenced by some f the famous writers and there were many quotes found with his remain or he had written them in some of his letters.

What influence did those writers had on him and what are the reasons beyond that???

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1- Leo Tolstoy and Realism.

He was a Russian author, essayist and moral philosopher wrote the epic novel War and Peace (1865-69) and Anna Karenina (1873 to 1877 ) .

Realism broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life(A Handbook to Literature 428).

Leo Tolstoy ranks as one of the world's great writers, and his War and Peace has been called the greatest novel ever written.It was also the peak of Tolstoy's personal life.

He wanted to give his wealth away, but his wife would not hear of it. An unhappy compromise was reached in 1884, when Tolstoy assigned to his wife the copyright to all his works before 1881.

Unable to deal with the family quarrels, in 1910 he set out on his last pilgrimage accompanied by his youngest daughter and his doctor.

The trip proved too much, and he died in Astapovo, Russia, on November 9, 1910.

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2- Jack London and Naturalism..

 

He was an American author, journalist, and social activist and his novel "The Call of the Wild" believed to have been the biggest impact on McCandless.

The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings(http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm).

In London’s adolescent, he worked at various hard labor jobs, pirated for oysters on San Francisco Bay, served on a fish patrol to capture poachers, sailed the Pacific on a sealing ship, joined Kelly's Army of unemployed working men, hoboed around the country, and returned to attend high school at age 19

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3- Thoreau and Transcendentalism..

He was an American author, poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist

Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. It is sometimes called American transcendentalism to distinguish it from other uses of the word transcendental(Wikipedia).

He spent his life in his home community, whose flora and fauna he explored with a microscopic eye, recording his observations

Early interpreters of Thoreau thought of him as a naturalist, due to his observations of botanical phenomena and the amount of time roaming the environs of Concord with spyglass, notebook, and pencil, recording the seasonal changes and life cycles of hundreds of plants.

He wrote disparagingly of the destruction of the natural environment, of which human beings were an integral part.

He deplored the implications of the rise of industrialism, with its emphasis upon materialistic values.

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