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...

"You didn't ask a man hard questions, not in the Ten Thousand Islands, not in them days," says a character in Peter Matthiessen's Killing Mister Watson, his long-awaited novel about a murder in the 1910 Florida outback. The same goes for Matthiessen himself....

A new approachdefensive tactics training The pickup truck finally stopped, after being clocked on radar at 85 in a 35 mile an hour zone. The hulking subject, with a strong smell of alcohol on his breath, jumped from the vehicle and yelled at...

The American Classics: A Personal Essay, by Denis Donoghue. Yale University Press, 295 pages, $27.Rapping the knuckles of the American classics is good fun-especially if it's done with a light, sharp touch. And nobody gets hurt, certainly not the great dead white males themselves, who...

In the following essay, Ruland analyzes the defining characteristics of Matthiessen's critical work, and evaluates his impact on American literary theory and criticism.

In the following essay, Grossman analyzes how Matthiessen's sexuality influenced his perception and discussion of the literary relationship between Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.

In the following essay, Dolan determines Matthiessen's important role in the critical rediscovery of the work of Herman Melville.