Matthew Josephson

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 printer who became a bank president before his death in 1925. Matthew Josephson graduated from Columbia University and married Hannah Geffen in 1920. 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 in 1969. They had two sons, Eric and Carl.

Initially Josephson wrote poetry, published in Galimathias (1923), and reported for various "little magazines." He became associate editor of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts (1922–24) and contributing editor of Transition (1928–29). Josephson was also a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post.

Josephson's first biographies were Zola and His Time (1928) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932). Influenced by Charles A. Beard and the Depression, and with only one major exception, Stendhal: or the Pursuit of Happiness (1946), Josephson changed his focus of interest from literature to economic history when he published The Robber Barons in 1934. This was followed by more full-length works in which Josephson served as a spokesman for intellectuals of his generation who were dissatisfied with the social and political status quo.

In a written interview for Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, Josephson said he enjoyed watching “the breakdown of our cult of business success and optimism.” He added, “The freedom of the U.S.S.R. from our cycles of insanity is the strongest argument in the world for the reconstruction of our society in a new form that is as highly centralized as Russia’s. . . .”

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.