Francis Otto Matthiessen (1902 - April 1, 1950) was a historian and literary critic influential in the creation of the field of American studies. He wrote and edited landmark works of scholarship on Sarah Orne Jewett, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.

Matthiessen's best-known book, American Renaissance (1941), discussed the flowering of literary culture in the middle of the American 19th century, focusing on 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, Whitman's first edition of 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.

Matthiessen was homosexual, though somewhat uncomfortable with the fact, and more or less closeted. He was the longtime lover and life partner of painter Russell Cheney; they shared a cabin 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). After Cheney's death, Matthiessen (who had already once been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown in 1938-39) was increasingly distraught; he committed suicide by jumping from a window in 1950.

Matthiessen's politics were left-wing, socialist if not dogmatically Marxist (as he felt his Christianity was incompatible with Marxist atheism). Since he was already financially secure, Matthiessen donated an inheritance he received in the late 1940s to his friend and Marxist economist Paul Sweezy; Sweezy used the money to achieve his ambition of founding a new journal, which became Monthly Review.

References

• Hyde, Louis, ed. Rat and the Devil: Journal Letters of F O Matthiessen and Russell Cheney. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1978. ISBN 1555831109; ISBN 0208016554.
• Levin, Harry. "The Private Life of F.O. Matthiessen (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=8104)." New York Review of Books 25:12 (July 20, 1978), pp. 42-46 (abstract online; full text for subscribers only).
• Matthiessen, F.O.. American Renaissance. ISBN 019500759X (also available in many other editions).

External links

• A brief Matthiessen biography (http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biom2/matt3.html)
• "America's Debt to Gay Sons of Harvard" (http://glbtjews.org/newsletter/nyt030529.html) from the New York Times