Frederic Newton Arvin was born in
Valparaiso, Indiana, and never used his first name. He studied English literature at
Harvard, graduating
summa cum laude in 1921. His writing career began when
Van Wyck Brooks, the Harvard teacher he most admired, invited him to write for
The Freeman while he was still an undergraduate. After a short period teaching at the high school level, Arvin joined the English faculty at
Smith College and, though he never earned a doctorate, won a tenured position. One of his students was
Sylvia Plath, the poet and novelist. He taught at Smith College for 38 years and was Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English during the year before his retirement in 1961. He rarely left Northampton for long, nor did he travel far. He visited Europe only once, in the summer of 1929 or 1930. He spent a year's leave of absence in the mid-1920s as the editor of
Living Age, a weekly compendium of articles from British and American periodicals. Arvin often wrote about political issues and took public political positions. For example, in 1936, on the day when Harvard celebrated its 300th anniversary, he joined a group of 28 Harvard graduates in an attack on retired Harvard president
Abbott Lawrence Lowell for his role years earlier on an advisory Committee to Massachusetts Governor
Alvan T. Fuller that found that
Sacco and Vanzetti had received a fair trial. Among his co-signors were editor
Malcolm Cowley and author
John Dos Passos. His first book-length publication,
Hawthorne, appeared in 1929. A Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1935 provided him a respite from teaching during which time he completed a biography of
Walt Whitman. In 1939 he became a trustee of
Yaddo, the artist colony in
Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was also a frequent
writer-in-residence. There in the summer of 1946 he met and began a two-year affair with the young
Truman Capote. Newton addressed him as "Precious Spooky" in amorous letters that went on to discuss literary matters. Arvin came to national attention with the publication in 1950 of
Herman Melville, a critical biography of the novelist. It won the second annual
National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1951.
Alfred Kazin thought it Arvin was elected a member of the
National institute of Arts and Letters in 1952.
Edmund Wilson wrote that of all critics of American literature only Arvin and his teacher Van Wyck Brooks "can themselves be called first-rate writers." Though Arvin's
Whitman reflected some of his leftist sympathies in the 1930s, he responded to the
Cold War with renewed cultural patriotism. In a 1952 essay titled "Our Country and Our Culture", in
Partisan Review, he wrote: ==Scandal==