ABSTRACT
F. R. Leavis is a landmark figure in twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. Frank Raymond Leavis was born on 14 July 1895; roughly a decade after T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound. His father ran a bicycle shop in Cambridge, the town in which Leavis was to live and work throughout his life. He was educated at the Perse school under the headmastership of W. H. D. Rouse who was noted for his teaching of classical Greek by the direct method. In 1919 he returned to Cambridge and started reading for a degree at Emmanuel College initially in History and then, after the first year, in English. In 1927 Leavis was appointed to a probationary lectureship in English to teach for the university without attachment to a college. Over the next few years he started to publish book reviews for The Cambridge Review but his primary commitment was clearly to teaching.
