[5] Arlen worked as a reporter on Life for five years, from 1952 to 1957,[6] before joining the staff of The New Yorker in 1957 where he remained until 1990.
[7] The book's title, a term Arlen coined, has gone on to be heavily referenced in academic and journalistic writing.
[8] His two best-known books are Exiles (focused on his childhood in the South of France)[9] and Passage to Ararat (about his Armenian heritage),[10] both of them personal histories that first appeared in full in The New Yorker.
Passage to Ararat won the National Book Award (Contemporary Affairs) in 1976.
He married a second time, to screenwriter Alice Albright, in 1972, and together they raised an extended family of seven children.