F. O. Matthiessen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._O._Matthiessen

Francis Otto Matthiessen (February 19, 1902 – April 1, 1950) was an educator, scholar and literary critic influential in the fields of American literature and American studies. His best known work, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, celebrated the achievements of several 19th-century American authors and had a profound impact on a generation of scholars. Matthiessen was well known for his support of liberal causes and progressive politics. His contributions to the Harvard University community have been memorialized in several ways, including a recently endowed visiting professorship.

Early life and education

Matthiessen was born in Pasadena, California on February 19, 1902. He was the fourth of four children born to Frederick William Matthiessen (1868-1948) and Lucy Orne Pratt (1866). The family's three older siblings included Frederick William (1894), George Dwight (1897) and Lucy Orne (1898).

In Pasadena Matthiessen was a student at Polytechnic School. Following the separation of his parents, he relocated with his mother to his paternal grandparents home in Lasalle, Illinois. His grandfather, Frederick William Matthiessen, was an industrial leader in zinc production and a successful manufacturer of clocks and machine tools. He also served as mayor of Lasalle for ten years. The grandson completed his secondary education at Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York.

In 1923 Matthiessen graduated from Yale University, where he was managing editor of the Yale Daily News, editor of the Yale Literary Magazine and a member of Skull and Bones. As the recipient of the university's Deforest Prize, Matthiessen titled his oration, Servants of the Devil, in which he proclaimed Yale's administration to be an "autocracy, ruled by a Corporation out of touch with college life and allied with big business". In his final year as a Yale undergraduate, he received the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, awarded to the senior who through the combination of intellectual achievement, character and personality, shall be adjudged by the faculty to have done the most for Yale by inspiring in classmates an admiration and love for the best traditions of high scholarship.

He studied at Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar earning a B.Litt. in 1925. At Harvard University, he quickly completed his M.A. in 1926 and Ph.D. degree in 1927. Matthiessen then returned to Yale to teach for two years, before beginning a distinguished teaching career at Harvard.

Scholarly work

Matthiessen was an American studies scholar and literary critic at Harvard University, and chaired its undergraduate program in history and literature. He wrote and edited landmark works of scholarship on T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the James family (Alice James, Henry James, Henry James Sr., and William James), Sarah Orne Jewett, Sinclair Lewis, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Matthiessen's best-known book, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), discusses the flowering of literary culture in the middle of the American 19th century, with Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Its focus was the period roughly from 1850 to 1855 in which all these writers but Emerson published what would, by Matthiessen's time, come to be thought of as their masterpieces: Melville's Moby-Dick, multiple editions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, and Thoreau's Walden. The mid-19th century in American literature is commonly called the American Renaissance because of the influence of this work on later literary history and criticism. In 2003 The New York Times said that the book "virtually created the field of American literature." Originally Matthiessen planned to include Edgar Allan Poe in the book, but found that Poe did not fit in the scheme of the book. Matthiessen wrote the chapter on Poe for the Literary History of the United States (LHUS, 1948), but "some of the editors missed the usual Matthiessen touch of brilliance and subtlety." Because Matthiessen, Kermit Vanderbilt suggests, was "not able to pull together the related strands" between Poe and the writers of American Renaissance, the chapter is "markedly old-fashioned." 1950 saw the publication of the Oxford Book of American Verse, edited by Matthiessen, an anthology of American poetry of major importance which contributed significantlyl to the propagation of American modernist poetry in the 1950s and 1960s.

Matthiessen was one of earliest scholars associated with the Salzburg Global Seminar. In July 1947 Matthiessen gave the inaugural lecture, stating "Our age has had no escape from an awareness of history. Much of that history has been hard and full of suffering. But now we have the luxury of an historical awareness of another sort, of an occasion not of anxiety but of promise. We may speak without exaggeration of this occasion as historic, since we have come here to enact anew the chief function of culture and humanism, to bring man again into communication with man". Along with John Crowe Ransom and Lionel Trilling, in 1948 Matthiessen was one of the founders of the Kenyon School of English.