Newton Arvin (August 25, 1900 – March 21, 1963) was an American literary critic and academic. He achieved national recognition for his studies of individual nineteenth-century American authors.

After teaching at Smith College for 38 years, he was forced into retirement in 1960 after pleading guilty to charges stemming from the possession of pictures of semi-nude males that the law deemed pornographic.

Life and Career more less

Scandal more less

In 1960, the office of the United States Postmaster General (then Arthur Ellsworth Summerfield) initiated a campaign against the distribution and possession of lewd materials, including soft-core homosexually-themed pictures. At the same time, local officials in Northampton were engaged in an anti-homosexual crusade. On September 2, officers of the Massachusetts State Police arrested Arvin on pornography-related charges. The police charged Arvin with "being a lewd person" and charged both him and a Smith faculty colleague, Edward Spofford, with "possession of obscene photographs." Police said Arvin led them to Spofford and that both implicated other male faculty members. Arvin, they said, admitted "displaying the photographs at his apartment and swapping them with others." Further reports specified that the pictures were of males, later revealed as issues of Grecian Guild Pictorial and Trim: Young America’s Favorite Physique Publication containing pictures of semi-nude men.

Arvin eventually pleaded guilty, paid fines of $1200, and was given a one-year suspended sentence and placed on probation. Court testimony established a public record that a local mechanic had sex with both Arvin and Spofford.

Smith College suspended Arvin from teaching, but kept him on half salary until retirement age. Yaddo removed him from its board, but soon offered him a fellowship, though he never visited the colony again. Not long after his arrest, Arvin spent some time in Northampton State Hospital where he was admitted for suicidal depression.

The only other faculty member caught up in the police sweep was Joel Dorius. Newton's biographer wrote that Newton provided the police with the names of Dorius and Spofford, but Arvin's relatives (a nephew writing on behalf of himself and his mother, Arvin's sister) have claimed that Arvin always denied that and said that the police obtained the names from materials found in his home. The Smith College trustees fired both Dorius and Spofford, both untenured faculty members.

Their convictions were overturned in 1963.

Joel Dorius

Raymond Joel Dorius (January 4, 1919 — February 14, 2006) was an academic and a professor of literature at Yale University, Smith College, San Francisco State University, and the University of Hamburg, Germany. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the son of strict Mormon parents who were a salesman and a teacher respectively. Dorius studied at the University of Utah and Harvard University. In 1949 he got a job as professor at Yale University and in 1958 he became a professor at Smith College. Dorius left the United States after the scandal and worked as a professor at the University of Hamburg in Germany. In 1964 he returned to the United States and taught as a professor at San Francisco State University. He died of bone marrow cancer at his home in San Francisco, California, in 2006. His publications include:

Shakespeare's "King Henry IV, Part 1": A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall 1971, ISBN 0133870359
Discussions of Shakespeare's Histories, DC Heath 1964, ISBN 0669220043
My Four Lives: An Academic Life Shattered By Scandal 2004

Edward Spofford

Edward Spofford (born 1931) is a retired academic and professor of literature at Smith College and Stanford University. His publications include:

The Social Poetry of the Georgics (NY: Beaufort Books, 1981), in the series Monographs in Classical studies

Death and Later Recognition more less

Arvin's final major publication, a study of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, entitled Longfellow, His Life and Work, appeared shortly before his death. The New York Times headlined its review "A Tarnished Reputation Reappraised." The reputation in question was that of Longfellow. The reviewer praised its "fresh and convincing conclusions that Longfellow's best is too good to be left languishing in its present state of neglect," though he expressed dissatisfaction that Arvin "too thinly handles relationships between art and biography."

Arvin Newton died of pancreatic cancer in Northampton on March 21, 1963 and is buried at Union Street/Old City Cemetery in Porter County, Indiana.

Truman Capote established in his will the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism to be awarded "in honor of the critic Newton Arvin." It has been awarded annually since 1994 by the University of Iowa. It is said to be the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language.

Friends published a collection of Arvin’s essays and book reviews as American Pantheon in 1966. Among the principal authors discussed are:Louisa May Alcott, Henry Adams, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Dean Howells, Henry James, James Whitcomb Riley, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and John Greenleaf Whittier, as well as Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. One reviewer, though unhappy with the book as a representation of Arvin's career, took the opportunity to summarize Arvin's contribution to the study of American literature: "He sharpened to almost unbearable precision the conflict between 'personal wholeness' and the social environment."

In 2001, Barry Werth published a biography, The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal. It provoked a response from Arvin’s nephew that criticized its portrayal of Arvin and particularly the charge that Arvin provided names of colleagues to the police in 1960.

In the course of reviewing that biography, critic Benjamin DeMott allowed that Arvin's "penetrating books about Hawthorne and Whitman...were trailbreaking in their time and remain readable today."

Mount Holyoke College held a symposium about Newton Arvin in 2001.

In 2002, Smith College established the "Newton Arvin Prize in American Studies," a student award.

In 2006, an independent documentary film titled The Great Pink Scare aired on the PBS series Independent Lens. It covers the arrests of Arvin, Spofford, and Dorius, and their subsequent careers.

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

Total Books: 10

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