THE INFLUENTIAL literary critic, writer, and activist c (1902–1950) measured writers by the degree to which they could express the spirit of the times in which they lived. He lifted this idea from T. S. Eliot, about whom Matthiessen wrote an early book. But even before The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935), he had been moving in this direction in Sarah Orne Jewett (1929), which was the first biography of Jewett, and Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1931), which grew out of his Harvard doctoral thesis. In these books, he examined both the literary works and their connections to the cultures from which they sprang.