Mizener, Arthur

Professor of English, Cornell University.

American educator, author, and critic Arthur Mizener was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, on September 3, 1907, to Mason Price and Mabel Moore Mizener.

American educator, author, and critic Arthur Mizener was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, on September 3, 1907, to Mason Price and Mabel Moore Mizener. He attended Princeton University for his undergraduate degree, received his master's degree in English from Harvard University in 1932, and returned to Princeton to receive his doctorate in 1934. In 1935 he married Rosemary Paris, who shared his love of letters.

Over the next sixteen years, Mizener taught at Yale University; Wells College in Aurora, New York; and Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he was the chairman of the English Department. In 1951, Mizener accepted a position as Mellon Foundation Professor of English at Cornell University and remained there until his retirement in 1975.

Mizener is best known as the author of the first F. Scott Fitzgerald biography, The Far Side of Paradise, which was published in 1951. The best-selling biography was praised for its frank portrayal of Fitzgerald's alcoholism and his wife Zelda's insanity as well as for its psychological insights into their lives. It was also credited with renewing interest in Fitzgerald and advancing Fitzgerald's reputation as a major American author. Twenty years later, Mizener published a biography of Ford Madox Ford, the British novelist and founding editor of Transatlantic Review and Two Worlds . In addition, Mizener published several other works, among them The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel and A Handbook of Analyses, Questions, and a Discussion of Technique for Use with Modern Short Stories: The Uses of Imagination ; edited various other works, including a collection of Fitzgerald's miscellaneous writings; and wrote numerous essays and book reviews. He died in 1988 at the age of 80.

Engar, Ann. "Arthur Mizener." Dictionary of Literary Biography; American Literary Biographers . Ed. Steven Serafin. Volume 103. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1991. pp. 184-191.