Matthew Josephson

Matthew Josephson
Born(1899-02-15)February 15, 1899
Brooklyn, New York
DiedMarch 13, 1978(1978-03-13) (aged 79)
Santa Cruz, California
NationalityAmerican
EducationColumbia University (BA)
Occupation(s)Historian, biographer, journalist
Known forThe Robber Barons (1934)
SpouseHannah Josephson

Matthew Josephson (February 15, 1899 – March 13, 1978) was an American historian, biographer and journalist. He authored works on French novelists of the 19th century, and on U.S. political and economic history of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He popularized the term "robber baron" in his best-selling 1934 book The Robber Barons about the first American tycoons.

Biography

He was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 15, 1899, to Jewish immigrant parents Julius and Sarah (née Kasindorf) Josephson. His father was from Iasi, Romania and his mother from Rostov-na-Donu, Russia. Julius Josephson was a successful printer who became a bank vice president before his death in 1925.[1]

Matthew graduated from Columbia University in 1920 and married Hannah Geffen.[2] They lived in Europe in the 1920s. His wife, librarian of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an author in her own right, worked closely with her husband on various projects throughout their careers. In 1945, she and Malcolm Cowley edited Aragon, Poet of the Resistance. Matthew and Hannah Josephson collaborated on Al Smith: Hero of the Cities (1969). They had two sons, Eric and Carl.

In the 1920s, Josephson immersed himself in literature and the arts. He became "an advocate of Dada and art for art's sake".[3] He published a collection of experimental poetry, Galimathias (1923). He edited Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts (1922–1924),[4] and later contributed to the transition literary journal. He wrote his first biography of a novelist, Zola and His Time, in 1928. The biography was credited with providing source material for the Oscar-winning film, The Life of Emile Zola (1937).[5]

The onset of the Great Depression changed Josephson's focus from literature to politics and history.[6] He edited The New Republic from 1931 to 1932.[7] He had articles appear in The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Evening Post. He published a biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1932. Influenced by economic historian Charles A. Beard, Josephson wrote his most successful book, The Robber Barons (1934), which he dedicated to Charles and Mary Beard.[8] The book quickly made the best-seller list and secured Josephson's national reputation.[9] He followed it with more full-length works of a political nature including The Politicos in 1938,[10] in which Josephson served—along with writers such as Edmund Wilson, Theodore Dreiser, and Malcolm Cowley—as a spokesman for left-leaning intellectuals who were dissatisfied with the social and political status quo.[8][11]

Josephson wrote two memoirs, Life Among the Surrealists (1962) and Infidel in the Temple (1967). He died on March 13, 1978, at the Community Hospital in Santa Cruz, California.[8]

Legacy

Josephson's papers are kept at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in the Yale Collection of American Literature.

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ "Julius Josephson. Pioneer Banker in Brownsville Section of Brooklyn Dies". The New York Times. October 16, 1925. p. 21.
  2. ^ Columbia College Today. New York, N.Y.: Columbia College, Office of Alumni Affairs and Development. 1970–71.
  3. ^ O'Neill, William L. (1981). "Popular History and Radical Chic". Reviews in American History. 9 (4): 451–53. JSTOR 2702636.
  4. ^ Mellow, James R. (June 29, 1975). "Their hearts belonged to Dada". The New York Times.
  5. ^ "The Life of Emile Zola: Full cast & crew". IMDb.
  6. ^ The exceptions to Josephson's movement away from literature were his books, Victor Hugo: A Realistic Biography of the Great Romantic (1942) and Stendhal: or The Pursuit of Happiness (1946).
  7. ^ "Matthew and Hannah Josephson papers, 1916–1976". Archives West. Retrieved May 2, 2025.
  8. ^ a b c Whitman, Alden (March 14, 1978). "Matthew Josephson, Biographer and Muckraker, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved December 15, 2014. Matthew Josephson, the Brooklyn-born biographer whose writings ranged from French literary figures to American capitalists, died yesterday at Community Hospital in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 79 years old and had suffered from asthma.
  9. ^ Shi, David E. (1981). Matthew Josephson: Bourgeois Bohemian. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. p. 158. ISBN 978-0300025637.
  10. ^ Shi 1981, pp. 182–188.
  11. ^ Shi 1981, pp. 143–144.

Further reading

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.