Stanlis, the son of
Lithuanian immigrants, was raised in
Newark, New Jersey. He was awarded his BA degree from
Middlebury College and his MA degree from Middlebury's Bread Loaf Graduate School of English. He earned his PhD from
Michigan University in 1951, and his doctoral dissertation was an analysis of Edmund Burke. Also in 1951, Stanlis read
Russell Kirk's
Randolph of Roanoke and found that Kirk, along with
Ross J. S. Hoffman, had come to the same conclusions about Burke's politics as himself. They became friends and Kirk wrote the foreword to Stanlis' 1958 work,
Edmund Burke and Natural Law. Stanlis dissented from orthodox academic opinion by placing Burke's political thought within the
natural law tradition of European thought. He later said that the book contributed to the interpretation of Burke's philosophy as "the basis of modern
American political conservatism". In 1959, he founded the
Burke Newsletter (later renamed
Studies in Burke and His Time) and in 1963 he published an anthology of Burke's works (
Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches). Stanlis taught at the University of Detroit from 1953 and was later a member of
Rockford College's English faculty for more than 20 years and he was awarded an honorary PhD from the college. He co-founded the
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1969 and from 1982 until 1988 he served on the
National Council for the Humanities, after being appointed by
President Reagan. He also served on the Academic Board of the
National Humanities Institute and was a research fellow of the
British Academy. From 1939 until his death in 1963, Stanlis was friends with the American poet Robert Frost and he published two works on the poet. Stanlis served as a
councilman in Michigan. ==Works==