Earl Reeves Wasserman, authority on 18th century and romantic poetry, was born in Washington D.C. on November 11, 1913, the son of Samuel and Jennie (Apperstein) Wasserman. He entered Johns Hopkins University in 1930 and took his Ph.D. there in 1937. He married Eleanor B. Franklin in 1937 and in 1938 went as Associate Professor to the University of Illinois where he remained for 10 years, returning to Johns Hopkins University in 1948. During World War II he served in the United States Navy as a Communications Officer in the Pacific. He held the Coline Donovan Chair in the English Department at Johns Hopkins University, and from 1954 was a member of the Editorial Board of the Johns Hopkins University Press. He was summer visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin in 1962, Columbia in 1959 and 1961, the University of Washington in 1962, the University of Colorado in 1963, and Harvard University in 1966. In 1967 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for work in Shelley's poetry and thought. He served as editor of ELH, a literary journal, and of Modern Language Notes. He was a member of the Modern Language Association, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Tudor and Stuart Club, and Phi Beta Kappa.

Wasserman contributed many articles to a number of publications and was the author of the following books: Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (1947); Edition of Thomas Purney's Full Enquiry Into the True Nature of Pastoral (1948); The Finer Tone: Keats' Major Poems (1953); The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (1959); Pope's Epistle to Bathurst: A Critical Reading with an Edition of Manuscripts (1960); Shelly's Prometheus Unbound: A Critical Reading (1965).

Professor Wasserman died suddenly on March 3, 1973.