Dupee was born in Chicago on June 25, 1904. He was the son of Leroy Church and Frances Wilcox Dupee. He earned a PhD from
Yale University in 1927. In the 1930s, he was a Marxist radical, whose circle included:
Robert Cantwell,
Edmund Wilson,
Malcolm Cowley,
John Chamberlain,
Erskine Caldwell,
Matthew Josephson,
Harry Hansen,
James T. Farrell,
Meyer Schapiro,
John Dos Passos,
Newton Arvin,
Kenneth Burke,
Granville Hicks,
Kenneth Fearing, and
Whittaker Chambers. With Cantwell and others, Dupee held an abiding interest in
Henry James. Within this circle, Dupee, Chambers, and Arvin were gay or bisexual. He taught at
Bowdoin College and
Bard College before going to Columbia University in 1948, where he taught
modernist literature.
Mary McCarthy was a colleague of his at Bard.It was while he was at Bard that he married his former student, Barbara "Andy" Anderson. {{cite magazine He was an eminent scholar of
Henry James, wrote on contemporary American literature and culture, and edited editions of
Austen,
Dickens,
Gertrude Stein, and
Leon Trotsky. == Personal and death ==