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The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal
by
Barry Werth
During his thirty-seven years at Smith College, Newton Arvin published groundbreaking studies of Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, and Longfellow that stand today as models of scholarship and psychological acuity. He cultivated friendships with the likes of Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman and became mentor to Truman Capote. A social radical and closeted homosexual, the circu...more
ebook, 352 pages
Published
September 29th 2010
by Anchor
(first published March 5th 2001)
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The Literary World revisited...
This book was given to me as a gift so I felt an urge to read it right away. It was a B+. It's about the literary life of Newton Arvin who was shattered by a scandal in 1960. I was born in 1959 so it was interesting to me to read of what was going on at the time. It ventures into the closeted homosexual literary elite. This book gave me other book ideas that I really want to read like: The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne, Letters & Leadership by Van Wyck Brooks, Ro...more
This book was given to me as a gift so I felt an urge to read it right away. It was a B+. It's about the literary life of Newton Arvin who was shattered by a scandal in 1960. I was born in 1959 so it was interesting to me to read of what was going on at the time. It ventures into the closeted homosexual literary elite. This book gave me other book ideas that I really want to read like: The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne, Letters & Leadership by Van Wyck Brooks, Ro...more
Jan 26, 2010
Vincent Desjardins
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
memoir-and-biography
For much of his life, Newton Arvin (born in 1900) was a respected literary critic and award-winning author. But Arvin lived a tortured and repressed existence. His greatest fear was that the public would find out about his homosexual desires. His career as a professor at Smith college, where he had taught for almost 40 years, came to an end when the police raided his apartment and found a stash of pornography (really not much more than a collection of muscle magazines). The injustices commited a...more
Newton Arvin, though a central figure in the early days of American literary studies, is not important enough or interesting enough to warrant a full-scale biography based solely on his accomplishments as a scholar and long-time professor at Smith College. Therefore, it is Arvin's life as a closeted homosexual and the scandal that ignominiously outed him that give this book its raison d'être. While Arvin himself is not always a sympathetic figure (when arrested, he was quick to try to save himse...more
I picked this book up after reading Arvin's classic bio of Herman Melville (which is itself worth checking out). Werth's treatment of the tale is reminiscent of the genre of non fiction I like to call "The Expanded New Yorker Article". That's fine, I love the New Yorker, but the weakness endemic to the genre is the feeling that 150 pages would suffice (and you're reading a three hundred page book). Regardless, I read the whole book and don't regret it.
Werth's treatment of Arvin's tortured feeli...more
Werth's treatment of Arvin's tortured feeli...more
This was a great read, I had never heard of Newton Arvin before reading this and I can't say since reading it I've become a fan of his work - literary criticism isn't the lightest of reading - but it is his story that is interesting.
The heart of this book is describing the lengths some will go to destroy what they fear is a "threat" to their society. The Pink Scare, as Werth puts it, followed on the heels of the Red Scare and sought to identify and persecute homosexuals in the the 1950s.
Arvin...more
The heart of this book is describing the lengths some will go to destroy what they fear is a "threat" to their society. The Pink Scare, as Werth puts it, followed on the heels of the Red Scare and sought to identify and persecute homosexuals in the the 1950s.
Arvin...more
Four stars for the quality, though not a 'fun' read. Even before the historically important tragedy and injustice of Newton Arvin, Ned Spofford, and Joel Dorius', amongst others, arrest and downfall over privately owned gay erotica and porn, Arvin was a consistently self-tormenting guy. I am curious to read, and would have liked in the biography itself, more of Arvin's own work. For all of his self loathing, Arvin was at his peak one of the premiere American lit critics and biographers of Melvil...more
Great read
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Jan 11, 2013
AniAngel
marked it as to-read
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
auto-biographies-etc
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