Arnold
grew up in Swampscott, Massachusetts and attended
Swampscott High School -
see the Class of 1953 website
(which he maintains). He is a graduate
of Harvard University
(AB
1957) and Yale University
(AM 1959,
PhD 1964), and he studied English Literature for a year (1957-58) at the
University of Manchester.
His Yale dissertation on the fiction of James Joyce
was published in 1966 as The
Joyce Paradox (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Evanston, Ill:
Northwestern University Press). He followed this with The Profile Joyce
(1968) and a number of other studies of Joyce - most recently on
newly-discovered Joyce manuscripts, for Joyce Studies Annual.
Arnold taught English and American literature at
the Universities
of Manchester, Sussex
and Keele, where he was
Professor of
American Studies. He also held visiting appointments at
Smith College, SUNY Buffalo -
now the University of Buffalo - Vassar College (where he was also Visiting
Director of the American Culture program) and
Tulsa
University.
In 1983 he became Deputy Chief Executive of the Council for
National Academic Awards in London, which until the end of that decade validated
academic programmes offered at UK polytechnics and higher education colleges and awarded
successful candidates their degrees. From 1989 he held various posts in quality assurance
and development at the
University of Kent, where he was also Honorary Professor of American Studies. He
retired from Kent in September 1999.
Besides his studies of Joyce, Arnold is the
author of essays
on Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, The Living Newspaper Unit, Melville,
O'Neill, Elliot Paul, Poe, the Provincetown Players, Synge and Yeats. He edited
a collection of essays on Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (Prentice
Hall), Dickens's American Notes
for General Circulation (Penguin Books, with J.S. Whitley) and Scott
Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (Penguin Books). From 1976 to
1982, he was Associate Editor of
The Journal of
American Studies (Cambridge University Press for the British Association for American Studies).
Arnold compiled and narrated BBC Radio 3 documentaries on
Joyce & the Irish tenor John O'Sullivan ("Send Him Canorius") and on the
Army Bureau of Current Affairs Drama Unit ("A Theatre at War") and a
play about the theatre of the 1930s ("You Must Take Over the
Leadership"), performed with a company of Crewe & Alsager College students
at a number of UK universities (director
Barry Edwards).
For a dozen years Arnold was a trustee of World
Education Services. Until 2000 he was Vice-Chair of the UK Staff and Educational Development Association
(SEDA), which he helped to found in 1993.
Since retirement, Arnold
has been chairman of the Trustees of the
Eastbourne Seniors Club
and chairman of the Eastbourne Forum for Older People
and is currently a trustee and director of
3VA. He was formerly a trustee and member of the executive of
the Wealden Federation of Voluntary Organisations and a trustee of the Herstmonceux Village
Information Centre.
