Arthur Mizener

Life & Legacy

Arthur Moore Mizener (September 3, 1907 – February 15, 1988) was an American professor of English, literary critic, and biographer. After graduating from Princeton, Mizener obtained his master's degree from Harvard. From 1951 until his retirement in 1975, he was Mellon Foundation Professor of English at Cornell University. In 1951, Mizener published the first biography of Jazz Age writer F. Scott Fitzgerald titled The Far Side of Paradise.
In addition to authoring the first biography of Fitzgerald, Mizener proposed the now popular interpretations of Fitzgerald's magnum opus The Great Gatsby as a criticism of the American Dream and the character of Jay Gatsby as the dream's false prophet. He popularized these interpretations in a series of talks titled "The Great Gatsby and the American Dream."
Although Mizener's biography became a commercial success, Fitzgerald's friends such as critic Edmund Wilson believed the work distorted Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's relationship and personalities for the worse. Consequently, scholars deemed Andrew Turnbull's 1962 biography Scott Fitzgerald to be a significant correction of the biographical record.
In 1971, Mizener released a biography about writer Ford Madox Ford titled The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford that received critical acclaim but did not achieve the same commercial success. He later wrote a supplemental Fitzgerald biography titled Scott Fitzgerald And His World. He died on February 15, 1988, at the age of 80.