Newton Arvin
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Frederick Newton Arvin (b. 1900 in Valparaiso, Indiana, d. 1963) was a literary critic, historian, and academic.
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[edit] Life and work
Frederick Newton Arvin studied English Literature at Harvard and was inspired by Van Wyck Brooks. Leaving Harvard in 1922, Arvin taught at several high schools before finding tenure at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
A homosexual, Newton Arvin endured a brief and unhappy marriage and is said to have had an affair with Truman Capote during the 1940s.
Arvin often wrote about political issues, until he came to national attention with the publication in 1950 of Herman Melville, a critical biography of the Herman Melville, the writer today most famous as the author of Moby-Dick. Herman Melville won the second annual National Book Award for non-fiction.
Other works by Arvin included a similar analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter. Another book on the same pattern, about poet and writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and entitled Longfellow, His Life and Work, was finished shortly before Arvin's death.
[edit] Scandal
In 1960, officers of the Massachusetts State Police arrested Arvin on pornography-related charges after investigations by the office of the United States Postmaster General (then Arthur Ellsworth Summerfield) into soft-core homosexually-themed pictures sent to Arvin by mail. The resulting scandal destroyed his career and resulted in the firing of two colleagues, Edward Spofford and Joel Dorius, whom he gave up in exchange for leniency in sentencing.
In 2001, Barry Werth's book The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: a literary life shattered by scandal, was published.
Mount Holyoke College held a symposium about Newton Arvin in 2001.
[edit] Books
[edit] By
- 1929 Hawthorne, ISBN 1-4047-6722-3
- 1950 Herman Melville, ISBN 0-8021-3871-3
- Longfellow, His Life and Work, ISBN 0-8371-9505-5
- Hawthorne's Short Stories (ed), ISBN 0-394-70015-5
[edit] About
- The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: a literary life shattered by scandal, ISBN 0-385-49468-8
[edit] External links
- New York Review of Books review of Barry Werth's The Scarlet Professor, by Benjamin DeMott
- PBS Documentary, "The Great Pink Scare"
- Newton Arvin at Philosopedia.org, including a 1951 letter in which he speaks about naturalistic humanism
