John Herbert Matthews was born on September 11, 1930, in Swansea, Wales, to John Oswald Matthews and the former Elizabeth Mabel Morgan. He earned a degree in French from the University of Wales in 1951 and completed a doctoral degree at the University of Montpellier in 1955. He married Jeanne Brooks on July 23, 1955, and they had three children.
In 1956, Matthews accepted an appointment as an assistant lecturer in French at the University of Exeter and the following year became a lecturer at the University of Leicester. He then moved to the United States in 1963 to serve as a professor of romance languages at the University of Minnesota. In 1965, he became a professor of French at Syracuse University, a position he held until his death.
Matthews was a prolific author, and most of his twenty-five books and numerous articles focus on surrealism and its manifestations in literature and the visual arts. His first book on surrealism was An Introduction to Surrealism (1965). In the 1970s, he began to further investigate surrealism in painting, photography, and film, producing works such as The Imagery of Surrealism (1977), Surrealism and American Feature Films (1979), and Eight Painters: The Surrealist Context (1982). In 1971, Matthews was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in university criticism for his book Surrealism and Film . He also edited two anthologies of surrealist works, An Anthology of French Surrealist Poetry (1966) and The Custom House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surrealist Short Stories (1975). Matthews often chose to study lesser-known surrealist authors and artists, including Joyce Mansour, Benjamin Péret, and Jehan Mayoux. In addition to his work on surrealism, he published works about Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. In recognition of his distinguished record of scholarly research and publication, the University of Wales conferred upon him a Doctor of Letters degree in 1977.
During his time at the University of Minnesota, Matthews served as an associate editor of Symposium, a journal in modern languages. He became editor of the journal in 1965 and held this position until his death.
Matthews died on February 8, 1987, in Lake Placid, New York. His final published work was The Surrealist Mind, which appeared posthumously in 1991.
From the guide to the J. H. Matthews Papers, 1950-1987, (The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center)
