Everything about F O Matthiessen totally explained
Francis Otto Matthiessen (
1902 -
April 1,
1950) was a
historian and
literary critic influential in the creation of the field of
American studies.
Scholarly work
He wrote and edited landmark works of scholarship on
T. S. Eliot,
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
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), discussed 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.
Personal life
Matthiessen, as a gay man in the 1930s and 1940s, chose to remain in
the closet throughout his professional career, if not in his personal life – although traces of
homoerotic concern are apparent in his writings. His longtime lover and life partner, the painter
Russell Cheney, shared a cottage with him in
Kittery, Maine for decades. In planning to spend his life with Cheney, Matthiessen went as far as asking his cohort in the
Yale secret society
Skull and Bones to approve of their partnership (Levin 43-44).
He was hospitalized once for a nervous breakdown in 1938-39. After Cheney's death, Matthiessen was increasingly distraught; he committed suicide by jumping from a window in 1950. Inquiries by
HUAC into his politics may also have been a factor in his suicide.
Politics
Matthiessen's politics were
left-wing,
socialist, though not dogmatically
Marxist, as he felt his Christianity was incompatible with Marxist
atheism. Matthiessen, who was already financially secure, donated an inheritance he received in the late
1940s to his friend, Marxist economist
Paul Sweezy; Sweezy used the money, totalling almost $15,000, to found a new journal, which became the
Monthly Review.
Further Information
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