Leo Damrosch

Leo Damrosch spent his boyhood in the mountains of the Philippines. He was born in 1941 in Manila where his parents were Episcopalian missionaries. Three months later the war arrived and the family was interned with 1,500 other foreigners in the Los Baños prison camp in Luzon. In 1945 they were liberated by a dramatic airborne operation. After the family’s return to the U.S. in 1950, they lived in various towns in Maine.

Educated at Yale (BA summa cum laude, 1963), Trinity College, Cambridge (Marshall Scholar, first class honors, 1966), and Princeton (PhD, 1968), he taught in the English departments at the University of Virginia (1966-83), University of Maryland at College Park (1983-89), and since 1989 at Harvard where he is now Ernest Bernbaum Emeritus Professor of Literature

His most recent books are Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (Yale University Press, 2013), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography and one of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in biography; Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake (Yale, 2015), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism; and The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (Yale, 2019), named one of "The Ten Best Books of 2019" by the New York Times. He is also author of Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), a National Book Award fnalist for nonfiction and winner of the Winship/PEN New England Award for nonfiction. In addition he has published seven academic books on literary and historical subjects.

He has four sons, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife, Joyce Van Dyke, and their sons Luke and Nicholas.

Contact:
Leo Damrosch, Department of English,
Harvard University, Cambridge MA 02138

damrosch@fas.harvard.edu