Mac Linscott Ricketts: Encounters with Mircea Eliade

Abstract

The four research interviews with Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) were taken by Mac Linscott Ricketts (1930–2022), who embarked on the project of writing a massive monograph on the Romanian period (1907–1945) of his former professor’s life and work. For this purpose, he conducted research in Eliade’s own archive in Chicago and travelled to Bucharest to consult the pre-World War II publications. Taken between 1981 and 1984, the interviews aim to clarify less known or contentious aspects of Eliade’s biography and intellectual formation. A fifth interview, planned for 1986, was outrun by the sudden death of the great historian of religions. Ricketts replaced it with a short conversation with his wife, Chistinel. The manuscript of the interviews preserved in Ricketts’s personal archive, now in the library of the New Europe College in Bucharest, was retrieved by Liviu Bordaș, who edited and enriched it with explanatory notes.