Based at Harvard, F. O. Matthiessen was one of the foremost scholars of American literature of the first half of the 20th century. Russell Cheney was a well-known painter in the 1920s and 1930s in the Boston and New York art worlds. After a chance meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris in 1924 the two men remained a couple – a marriage in everything but name and legal rights – up until Cheney’s death in 1945. Scott Bane’s talk introduces Matthiessen and Cheney and their respective family backgrounds, their professional achievements, their life together in Maine, and the background to researching and writing his book, A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney.

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This event is free and open to the public.

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