F. O. Matthiessen
Francis Otto Matthiessen, born on February 19, 1902, in Pasadena, California, was a prominent American literary critic and scholar best known for his influential works on 19th-century American literature. Raised primarily by his mother in a fractured family environment, he graduated from Yale University and later earned degrees from Oxford and Harvard. His academic career was marked by his role as an instructor at Yale and later at Harvard, where he contributed significantly to the study of American literature.
Matthiessen is particularly noted for his seminal work, "American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman," published in 1941, which is recognized as a foundational text in American literary criticism, focusing on key figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Throughout his life, he maintained a private relationship with painter Russell Cheney, navigating the complexities of their identities during a time when homosexuality was not openly accepted. Sadly, Matthiessen struggled with depression, exacerbated by Cheney's death in 1945, and ultimately took his life in 1950. Despite his personal challenges, Matthiessen's legacy endures through his critical insights and contributions to literary scholarship, shaping the understanding of American literature for future generations.
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F. O. Matthiessen
Historian
- Born: February 19, 1902
- Birthplace: Pasadena, California
- Died: April 1, 1950
- Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts
Biography
Francis Otto Matthiessen was born on February 19, 1902, in Pasadena, California, the youngest child of a broken family. He was reared by his mother, Lucy Orne Matthiessen, and scarcely knew his father. Francis graduated from Yale University in 1923 and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned a B. Litt. degree in 1925. Two years later he attained his Ph.D. at Harvard University and was appointed an instructor in English at Yale. In 1929, he made his last academic move, back to Harvard, where he taught until his death.
While completing his Oxford degree, Matthiessen met Russell Cheney, a painter about twenty years his senior. They were immediately attracted to each other and around 1930 established a household in Kittery Point, Maine, and eventually another in Boston. When apart, the two wrote a total of more than three thousand letters to one another. Both strove to conceal their homosexuality from the world at large, although they often entertained close friends whom they could trust with their secret. The couple’s mutual devotion continued despite Cheney’s serious problem with alcohol. Cheney’s death in 1945 was an important factor in Matthiessen’s growing depression thereafter.
Matthiessen published his first book, Sarah Orne Jewett, dedicated to the memory of his mother, in 1929, the year he was appointed to the faculty of Harvard University. This book is a sensitive study of the much-admired writer of village life in coastal New England. He went on to more important publications, including major studies of T. S. Eliot, whom he met during the poet’s residence at Harvard in 1932, and the great novelist Henry James. Matthiessen’s most famous work, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), not only was the first comprehensive study of five major American writers who reached their literary maturity in the mid-nineteenth century—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—but inspired the beginning of systematic study of American literature in the nation’s colleges and universities. Matthiessen’s portrayal of the contrast between the largely positive and optimistic outlooks of Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau, on the one hand, and the darker, more disturbing literary imaginations of Hawthorne and Melville reorganized the thinking of American literary scholars.
At times afflicted by the urge to commit suicide, Matthiessen underwent psychiatric counseling. On April 1, 1950, he jumped from a twelfth-story window of a building in Boston, ending a short, troubled, but brilliant life. It does not appear that opposition to his strongly held left-wing political views was a factor in his decision to end his life at age forty-eight. His The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (1935) is acknowledged as the first substantial book in English on Eliot, and few of all the books of literary criticism ever written have had the impact of American Renaissance.