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John Matteson (born March 3, 1961, in San Mateo, California) is a full professor of English and legal writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his first book, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.

Matteson is the son of Thomas D. Matteson (1920 - ), a former airline executive jointly responsible for developing the theory of Reliability Centered Maintenance, and Rosemary H. Matteson (1920 -2010), who worked as a commercial artist and fashion designer before becoming a homemaker.

Matteson attended Menlo School in Atherton, California. He earned an A.B. in history from Princeton University in 1983, a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1986, and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1999. He served as a law clerk for U.S. District Court Judge Terrence W. Boyle before working as a litigation attorney in San Francisco and in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has written articles for a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New England Quarterly, Streams of William James, and Leviathan. He has completed a draft of his current book project, a biography of Margaret Fuller, which is under contract with W. W. Norton. He is a former treasurer of the Melville Society and is a member of the Louisa May Alcott Society's advisory board. He married Michelle Rollo in 1991. They have a daughter.

NB: Matteson is NOT the professor at Los Angeles City College involved in a free-speech case with Jonathan Lopez.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Matteson", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0