SOURCE: “‘The Responsibilities of the Critic’: F. O. Matthiessen's Homosexual Palimpsest,” in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 84, No. 3, August, 1998, pp. 261-82.

In the following essay, Morris maintains that Matthiessen's literary criticism provides insights into his attitudes toward his sexuality as well as the practice of gay historical criticism generally.

“It is important to recognize that criticism creates American literature in its own image because American literature gives the American people a conception of themselves and of their history.”

Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (199)

“But man, even to himself, is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing and another beneath the lines.”

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (273)

On the day reserved for foolish deeds in April 1950, an open window in Boston's Manager Hotel became an accessory to troubled legacy. Twelve floors below the “airy room” he had requested lay a dying Harvard literary critic named F. O. Matthiessen. In...