Barry Werth
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The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin – A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal
Barry Werth
In this provocative and unsettling look at the consequences of America’s puritanical “need to punish,” Barry Werth explores the tragic story of one of America’s great literary minds whose life and career were shattered by the “Pink Scare.”
Newton Arvin (1900-1963) was one of America’s most esteemed literary critics, admired by Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman, and mentor to Truman Capote. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and in 1951, won the National Book Award for his biography of Herman Melville. As a scholar and writer, Arvin focused on the secret, psychological drives of such American masters as Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and identified the witch-hunt mentality that lies deep in the American psyche.
Born and raised in the constrained society of Protestant Indiana, Arvin was a social radical and an unproclaimed homosexual. He came through the Red Scare relatively unscathed, but when the national antismut campaign followed, his apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he was a distinguished professor at Smith College, was searched and relatively…
