Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews (1939–2017) was an American writer. He abandoned his music studies at Princeton University in connection with his marriage to the artist Niki de Saint Phalle and moved with her to Paris, where he began writing. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was associated with the New York School of Poets and formed an artistic friendship with John Ashbery. In 1970, he met the French writer Georges Perec. Perec helped secure Mathews’s admission in 1972 to Oulipo, the artistic group founded in 1960.