FO Matthiessen

FO “Matty” Matthiessen, and Russell Cheney, 1925

Francis Otto Matthiessen (born February 19, 1902 in Pasadena , California ; died April 1, 1950 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American literary scholar .

life and work

After his parents 'divorce, he grew up on his grandparents' farm in Illinois . Shortly before the end of the Second World War, he entered the service of the Canadian Air Force, but was not used in Europe. He studied and initially taught at Yale University . In 1929 he was appointed to the Chair of American Literature at Harvard University . Although he was deeply religious, he was politically close to socialism . In the 1940s he bequeathed an inheritance to the Marxist economist Paul Sweezy , who, together with Leo Huberman, used this money to found the Marxist monthly newspaper Monthly Review .

In 1941 he published his most famous work, American Renaissance , which featured the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , Henry David Thoreau , Nathaniel Hawthornes , Herman Melville, and Walt Whitmans . Alongside Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought, it remains the most influential work in American literary studies to this day . The epoch of American Romanticism is now often referred to as the " American Renaissance " according to Matthiessen's work . Matthiessen also wrote standard works on the work of Sarah Orne Jewett , Henry James and Theodore Dreiser .

Matthiessen was homosexual and was in a relationship with the painter Russell Cheney (1881–1945) for many years. In 1950 he took his own life - probably out of desperation over the death of his partner and the homophobia of the time - by throwing himself from the twelfth floor of the Hotel Manger, shortly before he was supposed to testify to the committee for un-American activities about his political past.

In 1948 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Works

• Sarah Orne Jewett . Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1929.
• Translation: To Elizabethan Art . Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1931.
• The Achievement of TS Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry . Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1935.
• American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman . Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1941. Numerous new editions, most recently Barnes & Noble, New York 2009, ISBN 9781435108509 .
  • German edition: American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman . German by Friedrich Thein. Metopen-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1948.
• Henry James: The Major Phase . Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1944.
• Theodore Dreiser . Sloane, New York 1951.
• The Responsibilities of the Critic: Essays and Reviews . Edited by John Rackliff. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1952.

Secondary literature

• David Bergmann: Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1993, ISBN 0-299-13054-1 .
• William E. Cain: FO Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1988, ISBN 0299119106 .
• Randall Fuller: Aesthetics, Politics, Homosexuality: FO Matthiessen and the Tragedy of the American Scholar . In: American Literature 79: 2, 2007, pp. 363-91.
• Giles B. Gunn: FO Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement . University of Washington Press, Seattle 1975, ISBN 0295954302 .
• Frederick C. Stern: FO Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NH 1981, ISBN 0807814784 .
• Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman (eds.): FO Matthiessen, 1902-1950: A Collective Portrait (1950) . Schuman, New York 1950.

Web links

• Literature by and about FO Matthiessen in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Members: Francis O. Matthiessen. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 13, 2019 .