After teaching at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, for 38 years, he was forced into retirement in 1960 after pleading guilty to charges stemming from the possession of pictures of semi-nude males that the law deemed pornographic.

After a short period teaching at the high school level, Arvin joined the English faculty at Smith College and, though he never earned a doctorate, won a tenured position.

He spent a year's leave of absence in the mid-1920s as the editor of Living Age, a weekly compendium of articles from British and American periodicals.

It is marked not only by a thoroughly convincing analysis of his creative power and its limitations, but, what is most sharply felt in the book, a wonderfully right feeling for the burning human values involved at every point in Melville's struggle with his own nature... .

He is concerned with the man's evolution in a way that leaves an extraordinary impression of concentrated sympathetic awareness.He particularly valued how Arvin's integration of the details of Melville's biography–his Calvinist background, the mental breakdown of the father he so loved, his mother's transformation by his father's failure and early death–exposes Melville's "grandeur and weakness.

[11] Edmund Wilson wrote that of all critics of American literature only Arvin and his teacher Van Wyck Brooks "can themselves be called first-rate writers.

[13]In 1960, the office of the United States Postmaster General (then Arthur Ellsworth Summerfield) initiated a campaign against the distribution and possession of homoerotic materials then deemed obscene.

[2] Edward W. "Ned" Spofford (1931 - February 17, 2013[18]) continued teaching literature, after his termination as professor from Smith College, at Stanford University.

[19] Raymond Joel Dorius (January 4, 1919 – February 14, 2006) left the United States after the scandal and worked as a professor at the University of Hamburg in West Germany.

The reviewer praised its "fresh and convincing conclusions that Longfellow's best is too good to be left languishing in its present state of neglect," though he expressed dissatisfaction that Arvin "too thinly handles relationships between art and biography.

"[22] Arvin died of pancreatic cancer in Northampton on March 21, 1963, and is buried at Union Street/Old City Cemetery in Porter County, Indiana.

"[24] In 2001, Barry Werth published a biography, The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal.

[16][17] In the course of reviewing that biography, critic Benjamin DeMott said Arvin's "penetrating books about Hawthorne and Whitman...were trailbreaking in their time and remain readable today.

[26] The Scarlet Professor, an opera about Arvin by Eric Sawyer and Harley Erdman based on Werth's book, premiered at Smith College in 2017.