Cornelius Mathews

Cornelius Mathews (October 28, 1817 – March 25, 1889) was an American writer, best known for his crucial role in the formation of a literary group known as Young America in the late 1830s, with editor Evert Duyckinck and author William Gilmore Simms.

This at least was the view espoused by the literary elite of New York, who tended to orbit the influential and conservative editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine, Lewis Gaylord Clark.

Mathews’ panacea was the emulation of Rabelais, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel, he believed, managed to advance philosophical penetration without etherealizing its subject matter.

For two years (1840–1842), Mathews and Duyckinck wrote for and co-edited Young America's uneven journal, Arcturus, publishing also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell.

"[7] Charles Frederick Briggs satirized Mathews in the novel Trippings of Tom Pepper, depicting him as a lawyer named Mr. Ferocious who frequently interrupts others to advocate literature which is "fresh, home-born" and free of foreign influence.

[8] Margaret Fuller, however, supported his advocacy for a national literature[9] and said that Mathew's play Witchcraft was an example of "a true, genuine, invincible Americanism.