He was the first full-time professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University in New York and played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal study by academics.

[2] Matthews began a literary career, writing novels, plays, short stories, books about drama, and biographies of actors during the 1880s and 1890.

One of his earliest books, French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1881), is a scholarly study of the subject and was revised and reprinted twice during two decades, while his 1919 autobiography, These Many Years, is a story of an education in the arts by a man who lived a rich and productive life.

Long before they were fashionable, he championed playwrights who were regarded as too bold for Americans, such as Hermann Sudermann, Arthur Pinero, and preeminently Henrik Ibsen, about whom he wrote frequently and eloquently.

Other students recalled him as a teacher who elicited "mingled affection and impatience"[4] and who behaved in a manner that never attempted to hide his privileged life and connoisseurship.

[8] Matthews taught a number of students who later had major dramatic careers, including playwright Behrman and drama critics Stark Young, Ludwig Lewisohn, and John Gassner.

During his long tenure at Columbia University, Matthews created and curated a "dramatic museum" of costumes, scripts, props, and other stage memorabilia.

However, its books were incorporated into the university library and its dioramas of the Globe Theatre and other historic dramatic venues have been dispersed for public display around campus, mainly in Dodge Hall.

Despite his complacent persona during later years, wearing mutton-chop whiskers long after that style has passed, Matthews was always an intensely social man.

During the 1890s he was a charter member of an informal group known as "the Friendly Sons of Saint Bacchus", which met in a bohemian cafe in Greenwich Village for entertainment and readings.

Other members of the group included the erudite and cosmopolitan critic James Gibbons Huneker and the rowdy Ashcan school painter George Luks, two New Yorkers notorious for their alcohol drinking, whose presence would suggest that the "sons" were not devoted to purely intellectual pastimes.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Theodore Roosevelt.