Brander Matthews, Theodore Roosevelt, and the politics of American literature, 1880-1920

About this book

Professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University from 1892 to 1924, scholar, critic, essayist, playwright, and fiction writer, Brander Matthews (1852-1929) was one of the most prominent and influential American "culture brokers" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book, the first full-length study of his career, explores the literary politics through which Matthews--often in league with his lifelong friend and ally, Theodore Roosevelt--worked to promote literary and cultural "progressivism" within and beyond the scholarly community. This study also reveals how Matthews, long ignored by scholars of American literary and cultural history, fell into undeserved oblivion. From 1880 to 1920, Matthews wielded enormous power from within the center of the New York literary establishment. Publisher's advisor, New York Times book reviewer, and MLS president, he counted W.D. Howells, Mark Twain, and James Weldon Johnson among his intimate friends. Later Matthews was attacked by the Young Intellectuals as a representative "genteel"--Despite such un-"genteel" behavior as championing Twain and literary realism, denouncing provincialism, and fighting to establish American literature in the academy. Matthews' "progressive" responses to such issues as the "Negro problem" and the "woman question" reveal an ideological conservatism. His career is a vivid reminder that academe was as "political" in 1890 as in 1990.