F. O. Matthiessen

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.

He was the fourth of four children born to Frederick William Matthiessen (1868–1948) and Lucy Orne Pratt (1866).

His grandfather, Frederick William Matthiessen, was an industrial leader in zinc production and a successful manufacturer of clocks and machine tools; and also served as mayor of LaSalle, Illinois for ten years.

Francis' three older siblings were Frederick William (born 1894), George Dwight (born 1897) and Lucy Orne (born 1898).

In Pasadena Francis was a student at Polytechnic School.

Following the separation of his parents, he relocated with his mother to his paternal grandparents' home in LaSalle.

He completed his secondary education at Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York.

Francis Otto Matthiessen (February 19, 1902 – April 1, 1950) was an educator, scholar and literary critic influential in the fields of American literature and American studies.

Francis Otto Matthiessen was born in Pasadena, California on February 19, 1902.

In 1923, he graduated from Yale University, where he was managing editor of the Yale Daily News, editor of the Yale Literary Magazine and a member of Skull and Bones.

As the recipient of the university's DeForest Prize, he titled his oration, "Servants of the Devil", in which he proclaimed Yale's administration to be an "autocracy, ruled by a Corporation out of touch with college life and allied with big business".

In his final year as a Yale undergraduate, he received the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, awarded to the senior "who through the combination of intellectual achievement, character and personality, shall be adjudged by the faculty to have done the most for Yale by inspiring in classmates an admiration and love for the best traditions of high scholarship".

He studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, earning a B.Litt.

in 1925.

At Harvard University, he quickly completed his M.A. in 1926 and Ph.D. degree in 1927.

He then returned to Yale to teach for two years, before beginning a distinguished teaching career at Harvard.

Matthiessen was an American studies scholar and literary critic at Harvard University, and chaired its undergraduate program in history and literature.

He wrote and edited landmark works of scholarship on T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the James family (Alice James, Henry James, Henry James Sr., and William James), Sarah Orne Jewett, Sinclair Lewis, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.

Already financially secure, he 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.

On the Harvard campus, Matthiessen was a visible and active supporter of progressive causes.

In May 1940 he was elected president of the Harvard Teachers Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor.

The Harvard Crimson reported his inaugural address in which Matthiessen quoted the campus union's constitution: "In affiliating with the organized labor movement, we express our desire to contribute to and receive support from this powerful progressive force; to reduce the segregation of teachers from the rest of the workers ...and increase thereby the sense of common purpose among them; and in particular to cooperate in this field in the advancement of education and resistance to all reaction."

His best-known book, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), discusses the flowering of literary culture in the middle of the American 19th century, with Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In July 1947, he gave the inaugural lecture, stating:

"Our age has had no escape from an awareness of history. Much of that history has been hard and full of suffering. But now we have the luxury of an historical awareness of another sort, of an occasion not of anxiety but of promise. We may speak without exaggeration of this occasion as historic, since we have come here to enact anew the chief function of culture and humanism, to bring man again into communication with man."

He wrote the chapter on Poe for the Literary History of the United States (LHUS, 1948), but "some of the editors missed the usual Matthiessen touch of brilliance and subtlety."

Kermit Vanderbilt suggests that because Matthiessen was "not able to pull together the related strands" between Poe and the writers of American Renaissance, the chapter is "markedly old-fashioned."

Along with John Crowe Ransom and Lionel Trilling, in 1948, Matthiessen was one of the founders of the Kenyon School of English.

Matthiessen's politics were left-wing and socialist.

Matthiessen seconded the nomination of the Progressive Party presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, at the party's convention in Philadelphia in 1948.

Matthiessen edited The Oxford Book of American Verse, published in 1950, an anthology of American poetry of major importance which contributed significantly to the propagation of American modernist poetry in the 1950s and 1960s.

Matthiessen was one of earliest scholars associated with the Salzburg Global Seminar.

In 2003 The New York Times said that the book "virtually created the field of American literature."

Originally Matthiessen planned to include Edgar Allan Poe in the book, but found that Poe did not fit in the scheme of the book.

His best known work, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, celebrated the achievements of several 19th-century American authors and had a profound impact on a generation of scholars.

It also established American Renaissance as the common term to refer to American literature of the mid-nineteenth century.

Matthiessen was known for his support of liberal causes and progressive politics.

His contributions to the Harvard University community have been memorialized in several ways, including an endowed visiting professorship.

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.