Arlo Bates was born at East Machias, Maine. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1876. In 1880 Bates became the editor of the Boston Sunday Courier (1880—1893) and afterward became professor of English at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Novels:

• The Pagan (1884)
• The Wheel of Fire (1885)
• The Philistines (1888)
• The Puritans (1899)
• Love in a Cloud (1900)

Collected Poems:

• Berries of the Brier (1886)
• Sonnets in Shadow, (1887)
• a Poet and his Self (1891)
• Told in the Gate (1892)
• The Torchbearers (1894)
• Under the Beech Tree (1899)

Collected Criticisms:

• Talks on Writing English (1897)
• Talks on the Study of Literature (1898)
• The Diary of a Saint (1902)
• Talks on Teaching Literature (1906)

Collected Stories:

• The Intoxicated Ghost (1908)

In 1912 he wrote an introduction to E. P. Whipple's Charles Dickens.