Newton Arvin's elegantly crafted biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1929), Walt Whitman (1938), Herman Melville (1950), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1963) constitute--to appropriate the title of a posthumous collection of his essays (1966)--an American pantheon. The biographies attempt to link their subjects both to larger issues of American history and letters and to larger patterns of "life" and "experience." For Arvin, biography's intimacies were a source of both cultural critique and humanist exempla. In the epilogue to Longfellow: His Life and Work, Arvin says that he countered the "spiritual uncreativeness of American life generally" by turning to the American nineteenth century in the hope "of discovering moral and intellectual ancestors." He looked to the "moral intensities" and "tonic individualism" of figures such as Hawthorne and Melville as possible ways out of the wastelands of twentieth-century American life.

Frederic Newton Arvin, Jr., was born on 23 August 1900 in Valparaiso, Indiana, to Frederic Newton and Jessie...