Peter Whigham was born in Oxford, England in 1925 and was largely self-educated. He worked as a gardener, a school teacher, an actor, a newspaper reporter, and a script writer before moving to live for some years in Italy. He moved again to the United States in 1966, the year in which his Penguin The Poems of Catullus appeared, first as a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and later in the comparative literature department at UC Berkeley. He was a well known Ezra Pound scholar. He died in a car accident in 1987.