James Brander Matthews was an American academic, writer and literary critic.
21 Facts About Brander Matthews
2.
Brander Matthews was the first full-time professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University in New York and played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal study by academics.
3.
Brander Matthews's interests ranged from Shakespeare, Moliere, and Ibsen to French boulevard comedies, folk theater, and the new realism of his own time.
4.
Later, Brander Matthews' father went bankrupt and the family fortune was lost.
5.
Brander Matthews began a literary career, writing novels, plays, short stories, books about drama, and biographies of actors during the 1880s and 1890.
6.
Brander Matthews wrote three books of sketches of city life.
7.
Brander Matthews was a prolific and varied writer, author of more than thirty books.
8.
Brander Matthews published a biography of Moliere in 1910 and a biography of Shakespeare in 1913.
9.
Brander Matthews was known as an engaging lecturer and a charismatic, if demanding, teacher.
10.
Brander Matthews' students knew him as a man well-versed in the history of drama and as knowledgeable about continental dramatists as he was about American and British playwrights.
11.
Brander Matthews's students knew him as an opinionated man with somewhat conservative politics.
12.
Brander Matthews looked at The New Republic and said, 'I am sorry to see you wasting your time on that stuff.
13.
Brander Matthews taught that performance was the main art of drama, not the literary texts of plays.
14.
Brander Matthews's conservatism became more pronounced during his later years: he was adamant about not admitting women to his graduate courses and publicly expressed the opinion that women did not have the natural ability to be great playwrights.
15.
Brander Matthews taught a number of students who later had major dramatic careers, including playwright Behrman and drama critics Stark Young, Ludwig Lewisohn, and John Gassner.
16.
Brander Matthews regularly invited students to his West End apartment for evenings of conversation.
17.
Brander Matthews retired from Columbia University in 1924 at the age of seventy-two.
18.
Brander Matthews was one of the founders of the Authors' Club and the Players' Club and was one of the organizers of the American Copyright League.
19.
Brander Matthews was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters during 1913.
20.
Brander Matthews married Ada Harland, an actress who had given up her career when they married.
21.
Brander 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.