Klaus Lanzinger was born in Wörgl, Tyrol, Austria, 16 February 1928. He graduated from Realgymnasium Kufstein in 1948, was a Bowdoin College foreign student scholar from 1950 to 1951, and finished his BA at Bowdoin in 1951. In 1952 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

He married Aida Schüssl in June of 1954. They have two children, Franz and Christine. He served as a research assistant at the University of Innsbruck from 1957 through 1967, working as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961.

Starting in 1967 he served on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1971 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1979. In 1975 and 1981 he won summer grants to do research at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. At Notre Dame he served as associate professor of modern languages, 1967-1977, professor, 1977-1997, and professor emeritus, 1997- . He also served as resident director of the Notre Dame foreign study program in Innsbruck, 1969-1971, 1976-1978, and 1982-1985; acting chairman of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, University of Notre Dame, fall 1987; and chairman of the Department of German and Russian, 1989-1996.

He is author of Epik im amerikanischen Roman, 1965, and Jason's Voyage: The Search for the Old World in American Literature, 1989; and editor of Americana-Austriaca, 5 vols., 1966-1983. He has contributed numerous articles to professional journals. He is a member of the Modern Language Association of America, of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, and of the Thomas Wolfe Society, whose Zelda Gitlin Literary Prize for best article on Thomas Wolfe he won in 1993. In 2001 the International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England, named him to the International Order of Merit. He is listed in Who's Who in the World, 23rd Edition, 2006, which is the source of the information in this biographical sketch.