Anthony Curtis was born on 12 March 1926 in London to Eileen and Emanuel Curtis. Educated at The Hall School, Hampstead, and Midhurst Grammar School in Sussex, he entered Merton College, Oxford, on a postmastership (scholarship) in 1944, where he did a six-month short course in history. In 1945 he joined the Royal Air Force, becoming a clerk at the Air Ministry before returning to Oxford in 1948 to read English. Awarded the Chancellor's Prize for an English essay on the subject of "Fancy," he earned a first-class honors degree from the School of English in 1950.

He spent the following year lecturing at the Institut Britannique de la Sorbonne in Paris, after which he became deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1952 to 1959. A Harkness Fellowship in journalism in 1959 enabled Curtis to study American literary criticism at Columbia University, Yale University, and the Huntington Library in California. In 1960 he helped found the...