SOURCE: “F. O. Matthiessen,” in The American Scholar, Vol. 46, No. 1, Winter, 1976-1977, pp. 86-93.

In the following essay, Lynn offers personal reminiscences of Matthiessen's tenure as an American literature professor at Harvard University in the 1940s.

Teachers of American literature who were born, as F. O. Matthiessen was, in the first years of this century, but who are still alive today, have seen the study of their subject move through three different eras. The first, which might be called the Era of Rediscovery, began with Van Wyck Brooks and H. L. Mencken around 1908; gathered strength in the nineteen-twenties and thirties from the work of Lewis Mumford, V. L. Parrington, Granville Hicks, Constance Rourke, and Newton Arvin; reached its most concentrated moment of excitement between 1939 and 1942, when Perry Miller's The New England Mind, Matthiessen's American Renaissance, and Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds appeared in rapid and dazzling succession; and...