Robert Rehder was born and grew up in eastern Iowa. He attended Princeton, where he majored in Near Eastern studies. He studied at the Ecole des langues orientales in Paris and at the University of Tehran, then returned to Princeton to do a PhD in Near Eastern Studies. He has worked as a checkroom attendant, private dining-room waiter, painter, busboy, gardener, picked apples, polished silver, taught English composition at Princeton, English grammar in Tehran and ice-skating in a nursery school. He lived for a couple of years in Tehran, travelled to Afghanistan, across Turkey and around Iran. He crossed the Dasht-i Kavir and Dasht-i Lut, the big deserts of eastern Iran, making the first scientific collection of the plants in the area for Kew Gardens.

For a number of years he was professor of English and American literature at the University of Fribourg in French-speaking Switzerland, where he lived in the small village of Corminboeuf.