beginning a distinguished teaching career at Harvard. Scholarly work Matthiessen was an American studies scholar and literary critic at Harvard University, and chaired its undergraduate program in history and literature. He wrote and edited landmark works of scholarship on T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the James family (Alice James, Henry James, Henry James Sr., and William James), Sarah Orne Jewett, Sinclair Lewis, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. His best-known book, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), discusses the flowering of literary culture in the middle of the American 19th century, with Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Its focus was the period roughly from 1850 to 1855 in which all these writers but Emerson published what would, by Matthiessen's time, come to be thought of as their masterpieces: Melville's Moby-Dick, multiple editions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, and Thoreau's Walden. The mid-19th century in American literature is commonly called the American Renaissance because of the influence of this work on later literary history and criticism. In 2003 The New York Times said that the book "virtually created the field of American literature." Originally Matthiessen planned to include Edgar Allan Poe in the book, but found that Poe did not fit in the scheme of the book. He wrote the chapter on Poe for the Literary History of the United States (LHUS, 1948), but "some of the editors missed the usual Matthiessen touch of brilliance and subtlety." Kermit Vanderbilt suggests that because Matthiessen was "not able to pull together the related strands" between Poe and the writers of American Renaissance, the chapter is "markedly old-fashioned." Matthiessen edited The Oxford Book of American Verse, published in 1950, an anthology of American poetry of major importance which contributed significantly to the propagation of American modernist poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. Matthiessen was one of earliest scholars associated with the Salzburg Global Seminar. In July 1947, he gave the inaugural lecture, stating: Our age has had no escape from an awareness of history. Much of that history has been hard and full of suffering. But now we have the luxury of an historical awareness of another sort, of an occasion not of anxiety but of promise. We may speak without exaggeration of this occasion as historic, since we have come