Frank Raymond Leavis (1895-1978) was born, raised and educated in Cambridge, England. He began his studies as a History major, but after serving in World War I he switched to Literature. He took his Ph.D. 1924 "on the relationship between literature and journalism in the eighteenth century". 1929 he married Queenie Roth (who did her Ph.D. in literature 1932). F R Leavis taught English literature at Cambridge and worked as a critic.
Leavis was an very well read man, and an influential critic of is time, but is today most widely remembered for his extremely vitriolic criticism of C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. The extreme aggression he displayed towards Snow made many readers take side with Snow - even if they didn't agree with Snow's ideas. Just to give you the idea of the tone of Leavis on Snow:
“Snow is, of course, a—no, I can't say that; he isn't: Snow thinks of himself as a novelist,(...) his incapacity as a novelist is … total (...) as a novelist he doesn't exist; he doesn't begin to exist. He can't be said to know what a novel is.(...) (Snow is) utterly without a glimmer of what creative literature is, or why it matters.(...) (N)ot only is he not a genius, (...) he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.”
(Two Cultures: The Significance of C. P. Snow (1962), cited from “The two cultures” today by Roger Kimball)
Bibliography (probably incomplete):
New Bearings in English Poetry (1932)
How to Teach Reading (1932)
Revaluation (1936)
Education and the University (1943)
The Great Tradition (1948)
The Common Pursuit (1952)
D.H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955)
Two Cultures: The Significance of C.P. Snow (1962)
English Literature in Our Time and the University (1969)
“Anna Karenina” and Other Essays (1967)
Dickens the Novelist (1970)
Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion, and Social Hope (1972)
The Living Principle: “English” as a Discipline of Thought (1975)
Thought, Words, and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (1976)
Cofounder and editor of the magazine Scrutiny 1932-1953