Francis Otto Matthiessen was born in Pasadena, CA in 1901. He graduated from Yale University in 1923 and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. He then attended Harvard University where he completed an M.A. degree in 1926 and Ph.D. degree in 1927. He taught at Yale for two years before accepting a a teaching position at Harvard University where his rose to become the chair of the Harvard University program in history and literature.
As an author his was most famous for his influential writings about the American Literary Renaissance of the mid 19th century. Shortly after being appointed to the faculty of Harvard University in the late 1920's he began to write his most important work in this field American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, which was published in 1941. In this book he examined the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. It has since become the most important work about the American Renaissance and has been published in 3 languages and 159 editions between 1941 and 2009.
Because of his socialist beliefs and romantic relationship with the painter Russell Cheney, he was targeted by anti-communist forces and by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1950 he committed suicide at the age of forty-eight.
Books by Francis Otto Matthiessen:
Sarah Orne Jewett (1929)
Translation: An Elizabethan Art (January 1931)
The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry, Oxford University Press (1935)
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941)
Herman Melville: Selected Poems (1944)
Henry James: The Major Phase (June 1944)
Russell Cheney, 1881–1945: A Record of His Work (1947)
The Notebooks of Henry James, edited by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (1947)
From the Heart of Europe (1948)
The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950)
The James Family: A Group Biography (1947)
To the Memory of Phelps Putnam, essay in The Collected Poems of H. Phelps Putnam (posthumous 1971)