Newton Arvin

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Frederick Newton Arvin, Jr. (born August 25, 1900 in Valparaiso , Indiana ; died March 21, 1963 in Northampton , Massachusetts ) was an American literary scholar who made a name for himself with his work on American romanticism .

Life

Newton Arvin studied English literature at Harvard University and was inspired by Van Wyck Brooks ' publications . After graduating, he worked at various universities and eventually got a job as a professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

After an unhappy marriage, he had an affair with the writer Truman Capote in the 1940s.

Arvin became known when he was fired from Smith College , where he was a professor, in 1960 after being arrested for possession of homosexual pornography . With him, Professors Joel Dorius and Edward Spofford were dismissed from Smith College for the same reason .

In 2002, Smith College admitted the unjustified resignation of the three professors, established its own lecture series, set up the $ 100,000 Dorius / Spofford Foundation for work on civil rights and freedom of expression, and wrote the annual Newton-Arvin Prize for American Studies worth $ 500.

The story of the professors' dismissal is told in the book The Scarlet Professor - Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal by Barry Werth .

In 1952 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

The Mount Holyoke College hosted a symposium on 2001 Newton Arvin.

Works

as an author
  • Hawthorne . Little, Brown, Boston 1929.
  • Whitman . Macmillan, New York 1938.
  • Herman Melville . Sloane, New York 1950.
  • Longfellow: His Life and Work . Little, Brown, Boston 1963.
  • American Pantheon: Essays on Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville and other 19th-century American Writers . Edited by Daniel Aaron and Sylvan Schendler. Delacorte, New York 1966.
as editor
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Heart of Hawthorne's Journals . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1929.
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne: Hawthorne's Short Stories . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1946.
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter . Harper, New York 1950.
  • Henry Adams: The Selected Letters of Henry Adams . Farrar, Straus and Young, New York 1951.
  • George Washington Cable: The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life . Sagamore Press, New York 1957.

Secondary literature

  • Michael C. Berthold: (Frederic) Newton Arvin, (Jr.) . In: Dictionary of Literary Biography , Volume 103: American Literary Biographers: First Series . Gale, Detroit 1991, pp. 13-20.
  • Chris Castiglia, "A Democratic and Fraternal Humanism": The Cant of Pessimism and Newton Arvin's Queer Socialism . In: American Literary History 21: 1, 2009, pp. 159-182.
  • Arnold Goldman: The Tragic Sense of Newton Arvin . In: The Massachusetts Review 7: 4, pp. 823-827.
  • Robert K. Martin: Newton Arvin: Literary Critic and Lewd Person . In: American Literary History 16: 2, 2004, pp. 290-317.
  • Barry Werth: The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin, A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal . Talese, New York 2001.
  • Edmund Wilson : Arvin's Longfellow and New York State's Geology . In: The New Yorker 39, March 23, 1963, pp. 174-181.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Associated Press: Joel Dorius; Professor Ousted Over Gay Porn ; Obituary in Washington Post, Feb. 26, 2006
  2. ^ Members: Newton Arvin. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 13, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Arvin, Newton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Arvin, Frederick Newton junior (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary historian
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Valparaiso , Indiana
DATE OF DEATH March 21, 1963
Place of death Northampton , Massachusetts