Best known for his monumental 700-page study of 19th-century literature, American Renaissance (1941), as well as influential books on Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Elizabethan translators, F. O. Matthiessen’s two years as a student at New College in the 1920s were defined by a reported desire to sequester himself in his tower, away from the hustle and bustle of the college below.

Dig a little deeper, however, and archival material gives a very different impression of the young scholar’s time at New College. A record of his academic interests over the course of those two years, Matthiessen’s so-called ‘New College Notebook’, survives at the Beinecke Library at Yale.  By cross-referencing its contents with other unpublished material at Yale and New College, the Notebook takes on special importance, bringing together the different threads of his life at Oxford: academic, social, psychological, and romantic.

Matthiessen’s passport, issued in 1923, which he used to travel to Oxford
F. O. Matthiessen Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSS 495, b. 11
 

© Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University