Background
Francis Otto Matthiessen was born on February 19, 1902, in Pasadena, California, United States. He was the son of Frederic William and Lucy Orne (Pratt) Matthiessen.
New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA
From 1919 to 1923, Matthiessen studied English literature at Yale University.
Oxford OX1 2JD, UK
In 1925, Matthiessen received a bachelor of letters in English literature at the University of Oxford.
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
In 1926, Matthiessen received a Master of Arts from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in English literature in 1927.
(A profile of the extraordinary nineteenth-century America...)
A profile of the extraordinary nineteenth-century American family recounts their reactions to one another, to contemporary writers and thinkers, and to major issues in American cultural history.
https://www.amazon.com/James-Family-Biography-Including-Selections/dp/0394742435/?tag=2022091-20
1947
(This is an amazing source of information. It has the text...)
This is an amazing source of information. It has the text of Henry James, Sr.'s unfinished autobiography, about 20 pages of text, but the best way to understand how he thought. There are many other parts of articles and reviews by family members. There are some nice visual portraits, including HJ Sr.'s wife. There are then "portraits" of individuals such as Carlyle, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Howells, developed from writings about and to these people by members of the James family.
https://www.amazon.com/James-family-Francis-Otto-Matthiessen/dp/B0007I9YNE/?tag=2022091-20
1961
Francis Otto Matthiessen was born on February 19, 1902, in Pasadena, California, United States. He was the son of Frederic William and Lucy Orne (Pratt) Matthiessen.
From 1919 to 1923, Matthiessen studied English literature at Yale University. In 1925, he received a bachelor of letters in English literature at the University of Oxford. In 1926, he also received a Master of Arts from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in English literature in 1927.
From 1927 to 1929, Matthiessen was an instructor at Yale University. Later, he became a professor at Harvard University (1929-50). Abandoning the formalism of his early works, such as Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935), he arrived at a socio-historical understanding of the literary process that was similar to the Marxist concept; Matthiessen’s new ideas about literature are reflected in his posthumous works Theodore Dreiser (1951) and Responsibilities of the Critic (1952). His American Renaissance (1941) is devoted to American romanticism and the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. Rejecting the views of modern criticism, Matthiessen was one of the first to appreciate the realism in the work of H. James and the importance of Dreiser for American literature. A number of Matthiessen’s studies were devoted to 20th-century American poetry and to aesthetics.
In Francis's book of essays From the Heart of Europe (1948), Matthiessen wrote favorably about the USSR, which he had visited as early as 1938, and about the European countries building socialism. During the McCarthy era, Matthiessen was subjected to cruel persecution, which led to his suicide.
(A profile of the extraordinary nineteenth-century America...)
1947(This is an amazing source of information. It has the text...)
1961Matthiessen's political and aesthetic stances recognize such unresolved contradictions as the conflict between the optimistic and the tragic views of life. During the early stages of his career, Matthiessen wrote with the goal of reconciling such contradictions. He later resigned himself to the belief that they could not be resolved.
Matthiessen’s doctoral thesis, Translation: An Elizabethan Art, was published in 1931. It demonstrates his interest in the way translators enrich the culture of their country by forging links with the past and adapting foreign classics to the specific needs of their own time and place. Through this study he came to associate the work of the translator with the work of the literary critic.
Critics such as H. L. Mencken, Lewis Mumford, and Vernon L. Parrington shared Matthiessen’s views on the importance of addressing historical concerns when criticizing literature. Yet Matthiessen criticized these very critics, fearful that a consensus would simplify the complexities of history in the interest of present-day political and aesthetic agendas. He also displayed an interest in synthesizing the various critical approaches of his day, and, as Pease noted, sometimes tended “to develop a cultural attitude in conflict with his own assumptions.”
Interested as he was in resolving the political and artistic contradictions within himself, Matthiessen was drawn to T. S. Eliot’s perception of a ‘dissociated sensibility’, that characterizes modem life. In The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry, Matthiessen moves away from an emphasis on history. He writes, that critics who focus on historical-based criticism ‘treat poetry as a social document,’ forgetting ‘that it is an art.’
In the years before the United States entered World War II, Matthiessen became deeply concerned by the threat of Nazi totalitarianism to the democratic values of the West. Matthiessen hoped that classic texts from Ameri¬can literature would fortify the country’s morale in fighting the fascist enemy.
In American Renaissance Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), Matthiessen contrasts the optimism of writers such as Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau with the darker, more tragic views of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and he separates America’s literary past into representatives of these two cultural strains. In the name of constructing a united cultural front for his age, Matthiessen thereby did what he claimed no responsible critic should do - he dissociated America’s classic writers from their defining cultural contexts and relocated them within the cultural and political milieu he designed. American Renaissance reflects Matthiessen’s affiliation with the Popular (or People’s) Front, a group attracting such Marxist-leaning writers as Langston Hughes, Lionel Trilling, and Kenneth Burke. This organization and others like it, tended to view Stalin’s Soviet Union as America’s ally against fascism.
Quotations: "Both the translator and the critic are entrusted with the duly to uncover the intellectual assumptions of past epochs and then to transmit their core ideas.”
Matthiessen was a member of the Popular Front, Oxford Labour Club, Yale Literary Club. He was also a vice president of a religious society at Yale.
Matthiessen was known to his friends as "Matty". As quoted by Pease, Barrows Dunham remarked that “when Professor Matthiessen died, the Cold War made its first martyr among American scholars.”
In Matthiessen’s posthumously published Theodore Dreiser, Matthiessen finds a writer whose beliefs in spirituality and tragic forces resonate deeply with his own sensibility in his later years.
Quotes from others about the person
“Matthiessen has unraveled as well as anyone could the tangled paths by which Dreiser approached simultaneously a membership in the American Communist Party and a cloudy position somewhere in the universe of neo-Christian mysticism,” wrote John Berryman in a New York Times review of the work.
Matthiessen was a gay. He was in relations with Russell Cheney, who was twenty years his senior.