Brander Matthews

• Name — James Brander Matthews • Born — 21 February 1852 • Birthplace — New Orleans, Louisiana, US • Died — 31 March 1929 • Place of death — New York City, New York, USA • Occupation — Professor of Dramatic Literature, writer • Education — Columbia University

Matthews was born to a wealthy family in New Orleans and grew up in New York City. He attended Columbia College, graduating in 1871. There, he was a member of the Philolexian Society and the fraternity of Delta Psi (St. Anthony Hall). He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1873. However, he demonstrated no real interest in law and never really needed to work for a living. Later, Matthews' father went bankrupt and the family fortune was lost. However, his mother's money provided him with a comfortable living.

Matthews began a literary career, writing novels, plays, short stories, books about drama, and biographies of actors during the 1880s and 1890. He wrote three books of sketches of city life. One of these, Vignettes of Manhattan (1894), was dedicated to his friend Theodore Roosevelt. Brander Matthews was a prolific and varied writer, author of more than thirty books. The claim to fame of one of his plays is its mention in Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie: it is the melodrama, A Gold Mine, which the character Carrie attends and which causes her to consider a drama career. Some of his surveys of American literature and drama sold very well as high-school and college texts. One of his earliest books, French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1881), is a scholarly study of the subject and was revised and reprinted twice during two decades, while his 1919 autobiography, These Many Years, is a story of an education in the arts by a man who lived a rich and productive life. It also offers an evocation of life in Manhattan c. 1860–1900. Matthews published a biography of Molière in 1910 and a biography of Shakespeare in 1913.

Matthews had an active professional life off-campus. He was one of the founders of the Authors' Club and the Players' Club and was one of the organizers of the American Copyright League. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters during 1913. In 1906, he was named the first chairman of the Simplified Spelling Board and served as president of the Modern Language Association of America during 1910.

• The Theatres of Paris (1880) • French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1881, revised in 1891 and 1901) • Margery's Lovers (1884) • Love at First Sight (1885) • Actors and Actresses of the United States and Great Britain (five volumes, 1886), with Laurence Hutton • A Secret of the Sea (1886) • The Last Meeting, A Story (1887) • A Family Tree, and Other Stories (1889) • In the Vestibule Limited (1892) • A tale of twenty-five hours (1892) with George H. Jessop • Tom Paulding: the story of a search for buried treasure in the streets of New York (1892) • Americanisms and Briticisms (1892) • The Decision of the Court (1893) • The Story of a Story, and other Stories (1893) • This picture and that: a comedy (1894) • Vignettes of Manhattan (1894) • Studies of the Stage (1894) • Pen and ink: papers on subjects of more or less importance (1894) • The Royal Marine: An Idyl of Narragansett Pier (1894) (Harper's New Monthly Magazine June 1894) • The Gift of Story-Telling (1895) (Harper's New Monthly Magazine Oct 1895) • His Father's Son (1895), a novel • Bookbindings Old and New: Notes of a book-lover, with an account of the Grolier Club of New York (1895) • Aspects of Fiction (1896; revised in 1902) • An Introduction to the Study of American Literature (1896) • Tales of Fantasy and Fact (1896) • Studies in Local Color (1898) • A Confident To-Morrow (1900) • The Action and the Word (1900) • The Historical Novel and Other Essays (1901) • Parts of Speech, Essays on English (1901) • The Philosophy of the Short-Story (1901) • The Development of the Drama (1903) • American Character (1906) • The Short Story (1907) • Americans of the Future and Other Essays (1909) • Molière: His Life and Works (1910) • Introduction to the Study of American literature (1911) • Fugitives from Justice (1912) Poetry. • Vistas of New York (1912) • Shakespeare as a Playwright (1913) • On Acting (1914) • The Oxford Book of American Essays (1914) • A Book About the Theater (1916) • These Many Years (1917): autobiography • Principles of Playmaking (1919) • Playwrights on Playmaking (1923)

Matthews married Ada Harland, an actress who had given up her career when they married. They had a daughter. During the 1890s he was a charter member of an informal group known as "the Friendly Sons of Saint Bacchus", which met in a bohemian cafe in Greenwich Village for entertainment and readings. Other members of the group included the erudite and cosmopolitan critic James Gibbons Huneker and the rowdy Ashcan school painter George Luks, two New Yorkers notorious for their alcohol drinking, whose presence would suggest that the "sons" were not devoted to purely intellectual pastimes. Matthews was a member of the long-running Gin Mill Club, a more exclusive informal organization whose members included Columbia University's president, Nicholas Murray Butler, and numerous public officials equally devoted to fraternal evenings of conversation, good wine, and good food. He was friends with many notable men, including. Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Theodore Roosevelt. His relationship with Twain had a bantering quality; in his famous essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," Twain lambasted Matthews' statements concerning Cooper's literary merits). Matthews' correspondence with Roosevelt, which extended from the 1880s through the White House years, was published posthumously. They shared a temperamental affinity as well as an interest in the cause of simplified spelling. In 1929, he died in New York City five years after his retirement.