Review of Robert Ackerman, J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work

"Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud are among the most important thinkers of the past century, and are significant shapers of the modern mind and of the present century" (Stanly Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud and Imaginative Writers [1966], p. x). Of these four, Frazer is probably the only one who has written more books than has books written about him. Surely, references and allusions to his works abound. In 1922 T.S. Eliot cited in his "Notes on 'The Waste Land' " Frazer's The Golden Bough as a work "which has influenced our generation profoundly" (The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 [1952], p. 50). In addition to T.S. Eliot, John Vickery counts William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce among the literary masters that cam under the influence of The Golden Bough (The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough, 1973).