Larry Lockridge is Professor Emeritus of English, New York University. A Harvard doctorate, he previously taught at Harvard, Rutgers, and Northwestern, and he has received Danforth, Woodrow Wilson, and Guggenheim fellowships, also an NEH summer stipend. Twice serving as Director of NYU in London, he shared the directorship with Denis Donoghue of The Poetics Institute,1986-90. In 1999 he taught a graduate course in Philosophy and Literature with Jacques Derrida. Most of his teaching has been in British and Continental Romanticism and the history of critical theory. He argued early on for the uses of philosophical ethics in literary investigation.

His books include Coleridge the Moralist (Cornell UP, 1977), The Ethics of Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 1989; rpt. 2005), Nineteenth-Century Lives (Cambridge UP, 1989, rpt. 2008, co-edited), and Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr. (Viking, 1994; rpt. with a new preface, Indiana UP, 2014), for which he received the MidAmerica Award in 1998.

He has keynoted two conferences on suicide and received a suicide prevention award from the American Association of Suicidology in1995. Other keynotes: "Ethics and Modern Criticism" (Hall of Parliament, Athens,1986) and "Romanticism and Authority" (House of Arts & Letters, Larnaca, Cyprus, 2010). He wrote the afterword to The Library of America's republication of Mary Jane Ward's 1946 novel, The Snake Pit. Essays include "Explaining Coleridge's Explanation: Toward a Practical Methodology for Coleridge Studies," "The Ethics of Biography and Autobiography," "Biography and Enigma," "The Coleridge Circle: Sympathy, Outrage, and Virtue Ethics," and "Shakespeare the Suicide?"

Since retiring in 2016 from NYU, where he received service and teaching awards, he has published The Enigma Quartet: The Cardiff Giant, The Great Cyprus Think Tank, Out of Wedlock, and The Woman in Green, with artwork by Marcia Scanlon (Iguana Books, Toronto, 2021-23). These are short satirical novels he terms "metafarcical"--standalone yet interrelated probes into gullibility, hope, plastic surgery, and suicide, respectively. He regards them as "moral fiction"--tales of hopeful resistance against fascism--and is writing more.