Donald A. Stauffer

American critic, novelist, and poet Donald Stauffer was born in Colorado in 1902. Stauffer earned his BA and MA at Princeton University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford University where he earned a DPhil degree in 1928. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II, before spending the majority of his career as professor of English and department chair at Princeton. David K. Vaughan has written that Stauffer was one of the major American soldier poets of World War II.

In 1946 Stauffer published The Nature of Poetry, which is considered to be a standard comprehensive history of American poetry. He died in 1952.