According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, "There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He's too many people if he's any good." Despite these reservations Fitzgerald himself became the subject of one of the more successful literary biographies of the twentieth century, Arthur Mizener's The Far Side of Paradise (1951). Along with Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin, and Edmund Wilson, Mizener helped to rescue Fitzgerald the artist from the legends which surrounded him and to secure his reputation as a major American author. In addition to the biography and his other works on Fitzgerald, which consumed much of his scholarly life, Mizener toward the end of his career also produced a biography of Ford Madox Ford (1971).

Arthur Moore Mizener was born on 3 September 1907 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to Mason Price and Mabel Moore Mizener. After graduating from Princeton in 1930 he attended Harvard, where he earned his M...