Born in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon in 1966, William Marx studied at the Lycée Thiers in Marseille before entering the École normale supérieure in 1986. He passed the agrégation in classics in 1989, and went on to defend his doctoral thesis in 2000 at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and his habilitation to direct research in 2005 at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis. He teaches in the United States and Japan, as well as at several French universities, before being elected Professor of Comparative Literatures at the Collège de France in 2019.
Member of the Academia Europaea, laureate of the Académie française and the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France, laureate of the International Francqui Professor chair, former fellow of the Institut d'études avancées de Berlin, regularly invited to foreign universities, editor of works by T. S. Eliot and Paul Valéry. S. Eliot and Paul Valéry, whose previously unpublished Cours de poétique he has published, he works in particular on canons and libraries, and on the long-term evolution of aesthetic systems and the status of literature from Antiquity to the present day, and their variation across cultures. Among his works, many published by Éditions de Minuit and translated into a dozen languages, are Naissance de la critique moderne (2002), L'Adieu à la littérature (2005), Vie du lettré (2009), Le Tombeau d'Œdipe (2012), La Haine de la littérature (2015), Un savoir gai (2018), Vivredans la bibliothèque du monde (2020), Des étoiles nouvelles (2021), Un été avec don Quichotte (2024) and Libraries of the Mind (2025).