Matthiessen, F(rancis) O(tto) (1902–1950)

US literary critic and educator. Among his many works on US authors, his American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) was a landmark in American cultural history and helped establish US literature as an academic subject. Other publications include Henry James: the Major Phase (1944) and Theodore Dreiser (1951).

Matthiessen was born in Pasadena, California. Educated at Yale, in 1923 he went to Oxford University, England, as a Rhodes Scholar. He was associate professor of history and literature at Harvard University from 1934 until 1942, when he committed suicide.