F.O. Matthiessen taught American literature for two decades, 1930-50, at Harvard, which by itself would probably not warrant a Wikipedia article. He was also, however, the author of a book, American Renaissance, about the "standard" American authors of the mid-19th century—Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson—that is the source of his fame in literary circles. I've never read it, but my impression of the general consensus about the book is that Matthiessen, by discussing these authors in their historical and cultural context—that of America a decade or so before the start of the Civil War—practically invented the field known as "American Studies," now often its own department within a university.
I wonder whether Matthiessen has any answers for a question that has sometimes occurred to me. If you sign up for a course in American literature, any period before 1850, the assigned readings are not likely to be the poems, novels, and plays that we usually think of as literature. Instead you'd read diaries and journals of colonial Americans, slave narratives, Puritan sermons, political documents relating to the founding (preeminently The Federalist Papers), some dull poetry (like by Edward Taylor and William Cullen Bryant), maybe Ben Franklin's Autobiography and "Rip Van Winkle." A hundred years and more of that and then suddenly, without warning: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby Dick (1851), Walden (1854), the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855).
Matthiessen's title indicates there was a reawakening, but to me it seems more like a first flowering, and from thin soil.
Anyhow, the Wikipedia article: I hit upon it the other day for no specific reason, and oh my! A suicide at 48, Matthiessen wrote, besides American Renaissance, about a half dozen books I wasn't aware of and was also an active left-wing socialist and a homosexual who lived with his partner, Russell Cheney, for 20 years ending with Cheney's death in 1945. Reading between the lines just a little, there comes into view a strange world in which Matthiessen seems to have been necessarily closeted though in an open-secret sort of way. It's affecting to think that his status as a scholar and Harvard professor is probably what made it possible for him to live half above ground (but half below). His progressive politics had nothing to do with this fundamental fact of his own life—gay rights had not yet been invented, or imagined. He was pro-labor, a union man, and but for his early death would likely have come to the attention of Joe McCarthy. There has evidently been speculation that the developing Red Scare contributed to his mental distress. The Life magazine of April 4, 1949, included an article, "Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Fronts," accompanied by a rogues' gallery of Albert Einstein, Arthur Miller, Langston Hughes, Norman Mailer, Matthiessen, and 45 others. Of course, Matthiessen had lost Cheney at around this same time. On April 1, 1950, he jumped to his death from the twelfth floor of a Boston hotel.
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