Word: matthiessen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...been of different temperament, Professor Francis Otto Matthiessen of Harvard University might well have rested content with his fame as a scholar. He was a bookish bachelor of mild manner and quiet voice, whose name had become one of the best known in the faculty. To his students, he was "Matthie," always ready to receive them in his book-lined study, always prepared to help them if he could. To scholars, he was the brilliant authority on Henry and William James, and the author of a penetrating book on the times of Melville and Hawthorne, American Renaissance...
...Professor Matthiessen was also an idealist in his own way, a man of deep concern about matters not touched directly by letters. Though painfully shy, he once accepted the presidency of the Teachers Union at Harvard, championed the rights of teachers whenever he thought them abused. Though never a Communist, he found himself in sympathy with many of the works of the U.S.S.R. and the Communist Party. Of Russia he wrote (From the Heart of Europe, 1948): "It knows what it wants, and brutalized as much of its practice may have been, it still points toward a goal that gives...
Howard Mumford Jones, professor of English, said, "Professor Matthiessen's death is a great loss to all those who knew...
Robert S. Schwantes, secretary of the Department of History and Literature stated, "The outstanding thing about Professor Matthiessen was his sensitive appreciation and intensive criticism of literature, qualities which excited and stimulated his students...
Professor John H. Finley, Jr. '25, master of Eliot House, said that Matthiessen, who was the first head tutor of Eliot, "was an extraordinarily devoted tutor and teacher in the College. He played an intense part in the lives of a whole generation...