The scholarship already accumulated on the subject of F. O. Matthiessen may be larger than that on any other American scholar born in the twentieth century. As the collective reminiscences published in the Monthly Review shortly after his suicide in 1950 attest, this attention is largely the result of the remarkable authority Matthiessen exercised in his various cultural duties as scholar, critic, political activist, and professor of literature at Harvard University. Matthiessen's collected work, comprising nine books, five anthologies, and over 150 essays, articles, and reviews, covers a vast range of topics. But all his topics were related either directly or tangentially to Matthiessen's lifelong task of forging a tradition of American literature which could be used as a cultural and political resource. The continued importance of his major book, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), testifies to the success of his project, which...