Harry Mathews Biography Quotes 26 Report mistakes

Overview
Harry Mathews (1930, 2017) was an American novelist, poet, and essayist whose career linked the New York School of poets with the European avant-garde, especially the Oulipo. He wrote fiction of dazzling formal ingenuity and playful erudition, and he used constraint-based methods to examine desire, habit, and the making of meaning. Over six decades he cultivated friendships and collaborations with figures such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, and Italo Calvino, and he helped introduce English-language readers to Oulipian ideas. Moving between the United States and France, he fashioned a body of work that is at once cerebral and mischievous, rigorously patterned and unexpectedly humane.

Early Life and Education
Mathews was born in New York City on February 14, 1930. He grew up in Manhattan and developed early interests in literature and music, an appetite for languages, and a taste for the sophisticated play of forms that would come to define his writing. He attended Princeton University, where he forged ties with writers and artists who would later be associated with the New York School, and he began to imagine a life abroad among European artists and intellectuals. By the early 1950s he had set his course toward Paris, a city that would become a permanent axis of his life and work.

Expatriate Circles and First Books
In 1949 he married the young artist Niki de Saint Phalle, with whom he moved to Europe a few years later. Their household, which included their children Laura and Philip, passed through Paris and other European locales and brought Mathews into contact with a wide network of painters, poets, and composers. Through Saint Phalle he also knew the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, and their circle became a key part of the postwar Franco-American exchange that shaped his artistic sensibility. Though the marriage ended in the 1960s, the cosmopolitan milieu it opened for him proved lasting.

Mathews published his first novel, The Conversions (1962), a witty labyrinth of riddles, lists, and false trails that immediately set him apart from American realism. Tlooth (1966), his second novel, staged a high-velocity chase across continents, conducted in a deadpan style and governed by hidden rules that reward close readers. During this period he also joined with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler to found the little magazine Locus Solus, a venue that reflected their shared appetite for experiment and transatlantic conversation.

Oulipo and Formal Innovation
Mathews encountered members of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle) in Paris and became the group's first American member in 1973. Working alongside Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino, he explored how constraints and generative procedures could open new literary possibilities. He did not treat constraints as parlor games; instead, he embedded them in stories of memory, love, deception, and habit. The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975) turned a Kafka-inflected conceit into a multi-angled puzzle. Country Cooking and Other Stories (1980) slyly tested narrative recipes. Cigarettes (1987), often cited as a masterpiece, arranged the lives of its New York characters through a rigorous permutation that exposes their loyalties and betrayals without ever sacrificing psychological nuance.

Two later books demonstrate his range. 20 Lines a Day (1988) is a compact diary of disciplined writing in which formal limits create unexpected freedom; it is also a portrait of life among friends and books in Paris. The Journalist (1994) follows a man who reorganizes his diary by proliferating categories, a constraint that gradually reorganizes his identity as well. Throughout, Mathews's methods resonate with Oulipian practice while remaining unmistakably his own.

Translations, Editing, and Collaboration
Mathews worked tirelessly to connect literary communities. He co-compiled the Oulipo Compendium with Alastair Brotchie, a key reference that mapped the group's history, techniques, and humor for English-language readers. He translated into English several works by the French novelist Marie Chaix, with whom he later shared his life; in bringing her voice to American audiences he deepened his commitment to literary exchange. He also wrote essays on art and writing, collected in The Case of the Persevering Maltese, where he reflected on the craft of fiction, the pleasures of constraint, and the art of his friends, including Perec and Ashbery.

Later Work
Mathews remained prolific into his seventies. Singular Pleasures (1999) showcased his gift for concise, formally exact pieces. The Human Country: New and Collected Stories (2002) gathered decades of short fiction, revealing the consistency of his curiosity about systems and desire. My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (2005) revisited a period in Paris when acquaintances mistakenly took him for a spy; his response, half-memoir and half-invention, folds the paranoia of the era into a comic study of identity and rumor. His final novel, The Solitary Twin (published in 2017), returns to themes of doubling, secrecy, and social ritual, displaying the clarity and play of mind that marked his earliest books.

Personal Life
Mathews's personal relationships nourished his art. His marriage to Niki de Saint Phalle exposed him to the radical energies of postwar European art; her later partnership with Jean Tinguely kept him linked to a kinetic, collaborative ethos. His friendships with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler connected him to the New York School's wit and openness. In France, Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau offered both camaraderie and a rigorous laboratory for literary invention, while Italo Calvino's presence in the Oulipo affirmed the group's international scope. In later decades he shared his life with Marie Chaix, and their exchanges of language and craft exemplified his devotion to translation as a form of intimacy.

Legacy
Harry Mathews stands as a crucial bridge between American experimentalism and the European tradition of formal play. As the Oulipo's pioneering American member, he brought its methods into U.S. writing and criticism, and as a novelist he proved that constraint could deepen emotion rather than stifle it. His books remain models of how structure can generate surprise, how comedy can coexist with intellectual rigor, and how communities of artists sustain one another across languages and borders. He died in Key West, Florida, in 2017, leaving a body of work whose elegance and mischievous intelligence continue to inspire readers and writers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Our collection contains 26 quotes who is written by Harry, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Music - Writing - Learning - Mother.