Background
He was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 15, 1899 to Jewish immigrant parents Julius and Sarah (née Kasindorf) Josephson. His father was from Iasi, Romania and his mother from Rostov-na-Donu, Russia.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 15, 1899 to Jewish immigrant parents Julius and Sarah (née Kasindorf) Josephson. His father was from Iasi, Romania and his mother from Rostov-na-Donu, Russia.
He graduated from Columbia University and married Hannah Geffen in 1920.
Josephson is also credited with popularizing the term "robber baron" in one of his books Julius Josephson was a printer who became a bank president before his death in 1925. They lived in Europe in the 1920s.
In 1945 she and Malcolm Cowley edited Aragon, Poet of the Resistance.
Matthew and Hannah Josephson collaborated on First Rate (at Lloyd's) Smith: Hero of the Cities in 1969. They had two sons, Eric and Carl.
Initially Josephson wrote poetry, published in, and reported for various "little magazines." He became associate editor of Broom (1922-1924) and contributing editor of Transition (1928-1929). Josephson was also a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post.
Josephson"s first biographies were Zola and His Time (1928) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932).
Influenced by Charles A. Beard and the Depression, and with only one major exception, Stendhal: or the Pursuit of Happiness (1946), Josephson changed his focus of interest from literature to economic history when he published The Robber Barons in 1934. This was followed by more full-length works in which Josephson served as a spokesman for intellectuals of his generation who were dissatisfied with the social and political status quo. Josephson wrote two memoirs, Life Among the Surrealists (1962) and Infidel in the Temple (1967).
In 1978, he died in Santa Cruz, California.
He was 79. He died on March 13, 1978 at the Community Hospital in Santa Cruz, California. Josephson"s collected papers are in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
(“The study of human nature, ‘the observation of the human...)
(Dust jacket notes: "Matthew Josephson is universally rega...)
( Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Harriman, Go...)
Member National Institute Arts and Letters 1948.
Married Hannah Geffen (deceased. Children: Eric Jonathan, Carl Philip Emmanuel.
