Leithauser was born in 1953 in
Detroit,
Michigan. He is an alumnus of the
Cranbrook School in
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and a graduate of
Harvard College and
Harvard Law School. He worked for three years as a research fellow at the
Kyoto Comparative Law Center in Japan. Leithauser has lived in Japan, Italy, England, Iceland, and France. He was married to the poet
Mary Jo Salter for many years (they divorced in December 2011) and previously taught at Mount Holyoke College. In January, 2007, Leithauser joined the faculty of
Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, Maryland. Leithauser's work has appeared in
The New York Times,
The New York Review of Books,
Time,
The New Yorker, and
The New Criterion. He is on the editorial board of the literary magazine
The Common, based at
Amherst College. Leithauser is the uncle and godfather of
Hamilton Leithauser, lead singer of
The Walkmen. ==Awards and grants==