(1852-1929)
Born in New Orleans, the son of wealthy parents, James Brander Matthews moved to New York and attended Columbia University. He began law school in 1871, but when his family's fortunes collapsed, he took a job writing for The Nation (1875-1895). Matthews also completed several plays, including Margery's Lovers (1878), A GoldMine (1889), and On Probation (1889). He had a deep interest in French literature and theatre, and this led to a position teaching literature at Columbia in 1891.
In 1902, Matthews became the first American academic to be a professor of dramatic literature. He did much to elevate theatre as an academic discipline, stressing that plays were not simply literature, but must be studied in light of performance issues. He continued at Columbia until his retirement in 1924. Among his two dozen books are The French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1882), Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States (1886; a five-volume work coauthored with Laurence Hutton), Development of the Drama (1903), Principles of Playmaking (1919), and two autobiographies, These Many Years (1917) and Rip Van Winkle Goes to the Play (1926).
The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater. James Fisher.