Early Life and Education
Matthiessen was born in Pasadena, California, where he was a student at Polytechnic School. Following the separation of his parents, he relocated with his mother to his paternal grandparents home in La Salle, Illinois. His grandfather, Frederick William Matthiessen, was an industrial leader in zinc production and a successful manufacturer of clocks and machine tools. Also, he served as mayor of La Salle for ten years. The grandson completed his secondary education at Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York. In 1923 Matthiessen graduated from Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. In his final year as a Yale undergraduate, he received the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, awarded to the senior who through the combination of intellectual achievement, character and personality, shall be adjudged by the faculty to have done the most for Yale by inspiring in classmates an admiration and love for the best traditions of high scholarship.
He studied at Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar earning a B.Litt. in 1925. At Harvard University, he quickly completed his M.A. in 1926 and Ph.D. degree in 1927. Matthiessen then returned to Yale to teach for two years, before beginning a distinguished teaching career at Harvard.
Read more about this topic: F. O. Matthiessen
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What is there in life except one’s ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)