<P> His work on criticism was a driving force for placing him back into the university spotlight . As a result, he was able to teach and lecture at various colleges, including Bennington College, while continuing his literary work . Many of Kenneth Burke's personal papers and correspondence are housed at Pennsylvania State University's Special Collections Library . However, despite his stint lecturing at Universities, Burke was an autodidact and a self - taught scholar . </P> <P> In later life, his New Jersey farm was a popular summer retreat for his extended family, as reported by his grandson Harry Chapin, a contemporary popular song artist . He died of heart failure at his home in Andover, New Jersey . </P> <P> Burke, like many twentieth century theorists and critics, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche . He was a lifelong interpreter of Shakespeare and was also significantly influenced by Thorstein Veblen . He resisted being pigeonholed as a follower of any philosophical or political school of thought, and had a notable and very public break with the Marxists who dominated the literary criticism set in the 1930s . </P> <P> Burke corresponded with a number of literary critics, thinkers, and writers over the years, including William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, and Marianne Moore . Later thinkers who have acknowledged Burke's influence include Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, J. Hillis Miller, Susan Sontag (his student at the University of Chicago), Erving Goffman, Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, René Girard, Fredric Jameson, Michael Calvin McGee, Dell Hymes and Clifford Geertz . Burke was one of the first prominent American critics to appreciate and articulate the importance of Thomas Mann and André Gide; Burke produced the first English translation of "Death in Venice", which first appeared in The Dial in 1924 . It is now considered to be much more faithful and explicit than H.T. Lowe - Porter's more famous 1930 translation . </P>

Who would best be described as an influential systems theorist