Robert Richardson was born in Milwaukee in 1934, brought up
first in Medford then in Concord Mass., went to school at
Harvard, then pursued a teaching career mainly at the
University of Denver. He has been married twice, first to
Elizabeth Hall, then to Annie Dillard. He has two daughters by
his first marriage and three step-daughters by his second.
He has taught at many schools, including Harvard,
Yale, The University of Colorado, The Graduate Center and
Queens College of CUNY, Sichuan University in China,
Wesleyan, and UNC Chapel Hill.

After writing books on Literature and Film, The Rise of Modern
Mythology (with Burton Feldman) and Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance, he
turned in his mid-forties to intellectual biography, spending ten years each on Henry
Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, (Univ of California press, 1986) Emerson: The Mind on Fire
(Univ of California Press, 1995), and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
(forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Nov 2006). He currently divides his time between Key
West, Hillsborough North Carolina, and South Wellfleet on Cape Cod. He is working on a
group biography set in eleventh century Persia and centered on the poet of the
Rubaiyyat, Omar Khayyam.