Bertrand Harris Bronson was born in 1902, in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, USA. After studying at the University of Michigan and Harvard University, he spent 3 years at Oriel College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received his PhD from Yale University in 1927. He went on to work as a professor in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley. He specialised in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Samuel Johnson. He died in 1986.