Robert Darnton was educated at Harvard University and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar. After working as a reporter for The New York Times, he became a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1968 until 2007, when he became Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard.

Hiis honors include a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Humanities Medal conferred by President Obama in February 2012. He has written and edited over fifteen books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979) and The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984). His most recent book is Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2010).