James Brander Matthews (February 21, 1852 - March 31, 1929) was an American writer and educator. He was the first full-time professor of dramatic literature at an American university and played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal study in the academic world. His interests ranged from Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen to French boulevard comedies, folk theater, and the new realism of his own day. Brander Matthews was a prolific, varied, and uneven writer, author of over thirty books. His own novels and plays are undistinguished and long-forgotten (the claim to fame of one of his plays is its footnote status in Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie: it is the melodrama, A Gold Mine, Carrie attends which leads her to consider a career on the stage).
