Word: matthiessen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...seventy-five, he left behind him a long, uneven, and controversial career that included thousands of pages of literary make shift and two or three books which made up for all the rest. In this new study of Dreiser, which was finished by Professor F. O. Matthiessen just before his death last spring and is now published posthumously, the details of Dreiser's life have been subordinated to an analysis of his important work--and the result is a thoroughly satisfying critical essay, though it cannot be called a real biography...
Born in Indiana in 1871, Dreiser grew up at the time when Genteel Tradition was giving way to a rising new movement called "realism." In the early chapters of the book, Matthiessen traces Dreiser's groping for a new expression of that movement, which search culminated in 1900 in the publication of "Sister Carrie...
This book was banned throughout the country for its frank treatment of the environmental forces which Dreiser, as an unsuccessful and errant journalist, observed about him. But Matthiessen points out that the writer, if anything, "somewhat softened the actuality" of the forces which shape the lives of Carrie Meeber and Hurstwood. With the tragic account of the latter figure, he adds, Dreiser "began his chief contribution to American literature...
Reversing the situation of the previous fall, 600 anti-interventionists held a peace rally at the College. The late F. O. Matthiessen, then associate professor of History and Literature, told the rally that war was not inevitable if the people did not demand it, which they "obviously...
...accepted as members; that hair-raising and lascivious practices occur inside the meeting-place vaults. Actually the "spooks"--as sour-grapes outsiders call them--take their membership very seriously. Henry L. Stimson always stayed with fellow Bonesmen in Paris, rather than with the ambassador; Professor F. O. Matthiessen laid his Bones Key on a farewell note before jumping to his death...