Reinhard Lettau was born on 10 September 1929 in Erfurt, Thuringia, to Reinhard F. and Gertrude Felsberg Lettau. He studied German literature, comparative literature, and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and at Harvard University. He married Mary Gene Carter on 4 September 1954; they have three children. Lettau received his doctoral degree from Harvard in 1960 with a dissertation titled "Utopie und Roman" (Utopia and Novel). He taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1957 until 1965. From 1965 to 1967 he lived in West Berlin as a free-lance writer. Since 1967 he has taught German literature and creative writing at the University of California in San Diego. In 1979 Lettau was awarded the Radio Play Prize of the Blind War Veterans for his adaptation of his Frühstücksgespräche in Miami (Discussions at the Breakfast Table in Miami, 1977; translated as Breakfast in Miami, 1982).

Lettau's stories and poems often verge on the grotesque...