Matthew 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.

Matthew graduated from Columbia University in 1920 and married Hannah Geffen. 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". He published a collection of experimental poetry, Galimathias (1923). He edited Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts (1922–1924), 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).

The onset of the Great Depression changed Josephson's focus from literature to politics and history. He edited The New Republic from 1931 to 1932. 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. He followed it with more full-length works of a political nature including The Politicos in 1938, 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.

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