Tales of Fantasy and Fact

This collection dives into the strange waters where legend meets memoir. Matthews, a pioneering Columbia professor of dramatic literature, serves as both collector and skeptic, inviting readers aboard the Flying Dutchman itself for a conversation that blurs the line between tall tale and testimony. The opening story finds our narrator drawn into dialogue with Captain Vanderdecken, that immortal mariner cursed to sail forever, discussing the Wandering Jew, Rip Van Winkle, and other figures who slip between history and myth. These are not fairy tales for children but sophisticated meditations on how Americans in the Gilded Age understood their relationship to European folklore, remaking old world legends into something stranger and more personal. The prose has a quiet, wry charm, the kind that suggests a professor smoking a pipe and telling stories late into the night. For readers who love literary forensics, metafiction, or the romantic notion that every traveler has a ghost story to tell.