Ronald C. Rosbottom was born in New Orleans and raised in the American South. He was educated at Tulane University and Princeton University, and he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the Ohio State University. For the past two and a half decades he has been a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he is the holder of an endowed chair, the Winifred Arms Professsorship in the Arts and the Humanities. He has published extensively, editing or authoring five books and dozens of articles and reviews on French and English narrative literature. For many years, he was the executive secretary and a member of the executive board of the Amercian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. At Amherst, he has taught courses on the history of Paris, the legends of Napolean, and on how World War II has been represented in film and literature. A frequent visitor to Paris and France, Rosbottom is married to cookbook author Betty Rosbottom and lives in Massachusetts.