Background
Matthews, Jack was born on July 22, 1925 in Columbus, Ohio, United States. Son of John Harold and Lulu Emma (Grover) Matthews.
(In this provocative & immensely irritating comic play, th...)
In this provocative & immensely irritating comic play, the Sphinx from ancient Greece is interviewed in modern times as though she were a celebrity pop star. The problem is, she never answers any questions -- never directly anyway. Instead she prefers just dishing the dirt on everybody. ON HOMER: "I never was exactly sure which one Homer was. I'm positive he wasn't the blind one, though; that was just a silly story they started telling a few centuries later". ON OEDIPUS: "Eddie was terribly conceited, you know … of course he was smart and handsome and, oh, just had a way of carrying himself that impressed everybody. In spite of his foot." Bit by bit the Interview learns that what happened in Greek legend didn't happen exactly the way Sophocles described it. Fortunately, the Sphinx offers the Interviewer another riddle ... if only he could figure out what exactly it is! Part Tom Stoppard, part Monty Python, part Oscar Wilde, this play by Jack Matthews combines philosophical paradoxes with fast-paced verbal pyrotechnics. It offers the perfect antidote to people who remembered ancient literature as nothing but stuffy and melodramatic characters with hard-to-pronounce names. In 2013 an audio version of this one act play was produced by Personville Press. This ebook contains the complete script used for the 2013 audio production plus another expanded two act version of the same play. This expanded two act version is titled "Dr. Freud and the Sphinx," and includes Florence Nightingale and Sigmund Freud characters (who serve as the Greek chorus). Playwright JACK MATTHEWS is the author of 10+ plays and 20+ books (including short stories, novels and essays). Winner of the Guggenheim, a play competition and several arts grants, Matthews has been anthologized widely, translated into several languages and nominated for a National Book Award. Matthews was distinguished professor of Fiction Writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for over 4 decades. "Mr. Matthews is a master of prose conversation and deadpan charm. He is ironic, cool, and shrewd, and he writes a lucid prose." (Tim O'Brien, New York Times)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BME0U94/?tag=2022091-20
( “The covetous foraging for old and rare books,” is how ...)
“The covetous foraging for old and rare books,” is how Matthews defines “booking.” It is an act which leads naturally to the pleasures of adding them to one's personal library, then reading them as instruments of light and measure in a murky and chaotic world. The understanding that books are intrinsic to civilized living is wisdom as old as civilization itself; it is affirmed here, in their various ways, by the people who inspire and inhabit these pages: the quasi-literate clerk of the steamboat Science on the Ohio River in 1835; a young fiction writer who got drunk one night and stole the bust of Edgar Allen Poe from the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia; and a guru of the computer age, who writes: “Books have always been important to me and to the people around me.” Matthews explores the collecting of old dictionaries, whose definitions can be read as a sort of poetry; an 1840's rhyming book once used as a mnemonic tool for small children; and the wildly scrawled annotations of an exuberant painter in a battered copy of Thomas Hart Benton's An Artist in America. In other essays, Matthews compares booking with Charles Darwin's passion for collecting beetles; follows Nero Wolfe of the Rex Stout novels, who grew tentatively into a vivid and fascinating detective; and celebrates the zealous idealism of 1890s fraternity boys as reflected by some of their century-old publications. In sharing Matthews's adventures as an implacable bookman, readers will find, not an escape from life, but new entrance ways through old books.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0821411292/?tag=2022091-20
(From the author of six novels and five other short story ...)
From the author of six novels and five other short story collections, including "Dubious Persuasions", "Crazy Women", "Ghostly Populations" and "Dirty Tricks", this is a collection of 15 short stories, all "saturated with time".
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801846234/?tag=2022091-20
( These memoirs are the reminiscences of Jack Matthews: h...)
These memoirs are the reminiscences of Jack Matthews: his adventures in seeking out, collecting, and reading old and rare books, along with reflections upon time, memory, and other mysteries. In one piece, he measures the psychological distance from when he first saw Lake Erie at the age of four — the sight of which “took his breath away" — to many decades later, when, as he was flying from Detroit to Cleveland, Lake Erie revealed both shores and gave his breath back, depriving him of the first absolute he can remember. Elsewhere, he ponders upon how strangely our lifespans overlap others, telling about his father driving in his Model T and picking up an old Indian who said he’d been a scout for Custer, surviving Big Horn by hiding under corpses. Such purviews, Matthews believes, give a sense of mythic reach-much as do the old books and manuscripts he loves to collect. Other pieces in his Memoirs tell of a famous English poet’s last years in a tiny Ohio town; an old frontier medical book that prescribes such medicines as snake root, sawdust, and rye whiskey; an 1863 Unionist Kentucky newspaper advertising a slave auction; and 150 year old jest books, filled with such dreary specimens that one wonders how desperate people were to find mirth in them. In these reflections, old books and human realities are inextricably mingled, providing warm and thoughtful insights by a self-described “philosophical sentimentalist.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0821409379/?tag=2022091-20
Matthews, Jack was born on July 22, 1925 in Columbus, Ohio, United States. Son of John Harold and Lulu Emma (Grover) Matthews.
Bachelor of Arts, Ohio State University, 1949; Master of Arts, Ohio State University, 1954.
Clerk United States Post Office, Columbus, 1950-1959. Professor English Urbana College, Ohio, 1959-1964, Ohio University, Athens, 1964-1977, distinguished professor, 1977—2003, distinguished professor emeritus, since 2003.
(From the author of six novels and five other short story ...)
( These memoirs are the reminiscences of Jack Matthews: h...)
(In this provocative & immensely irritating comic play, th...)
( “The covetous foraging for old and rare books,” is how ...)
(Book by Matthews, Professor Jack)
(First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylo...)
(Book by Matthews, Jack)
Served with United States Coast Guard, 1943-1945. Member Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Barbara Jane Reese, September 16, 1947. Children: Cynthia Ann Matthews Warnock, Barbara Ellen Matthews Saunders, John Harold.