Born in Brooklyn, New York, Lopate graduated with a BA degree from Columbia University in 1964 and received his doctorate from Union University in 1979. Lopate worked as a writer-in-the-schools for twelve years and his memoir Being With Children came out of his association with the artists-in-the-school organization Teachers & Writers Collaborative. He has taught creative writing and literature to undergraduate and graduate students at several institutions, including Bennington College, Fordham University, Cooper Union, the University of Houston, New York University (NYU), Columbia University School of the Arts, and The New School. He currently holds the Adams Chair at Hofstra University, where he is Professor of English.

Creative writing

Lopate's essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in several Pushcart Prize annuals, the anthologies Congregation and Testimony, and The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Harvard Educational Review, The New York Times Book Review, Boulevard, The Journal of Contemporary Fiction, Double Take, among others.

Travel

Lopate has written for the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Conde Nast Traveler, European Travel and Life, Sidestreets of the World, and American Way.

Architecture

Lopate has written about architecture and urbanism for Metropolis, The New York Times, Double Take, Preservation, Cite, and 7 Days, where he wrote a bimonthly architectural column. He has served as a committee-member for the Municipal Art Society and as a consultant for Ric Burns' PBS documentary on the history of New York City.

Media critic

He has written about movies for The New York Times, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Cinemabook, Threepenny Review, Tikkun, American Film, and the anthology The Movie That Changed My Life, among others. A volume of his selected movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically, was published by Doubleday-Anchor in 1998. A massive anthology of American film criticism from the silent era to present day, entitled American Movie Critics: From Silents Until Now, was published in March 2006 for Library of America.

Lopate has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He also received a Christopher Medal for Being With Children, the Texas Institute of Letters award for best non-fiction book of the year (for Bachelorhood), and was a finalist for the Spielvogel-Diamonstein PEN Award for best essay book of the year (for Portrait of My Body). His anthology Writing New York received an honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Award, and a citation from the New York Society Library. He was also a Lila Wallace Foundation writer-in-residence. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Essay collections

• Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981)
• Against Joie de Vivre (Simon & Schuster, 1989)
• Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996)
• Totally Tenderly Tragically (Anchor, 1998)
• Notes on Sontag (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Fiction

• Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979)
• The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987)
• Two Marriages (Other Press, 2008)

Poetry collections

• The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972)
• The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976)

Memoir

• Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975).

Anthologies (as contributor)

• The Best American Short Stories (1974)
• The Best American Essays (1987)

Anthologies (as editor)

• The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday-Anchor, 1994)
• Writing New York (The Library of America, 1998)
• Journal of a Living Experiment (Teachers & Writers Press, 1979)
• The Anchor Essay Annual (Anchor, 1997-9)
• The Phillip Lopate Reader (Basic Books, 2003)
• American Movie Critics (Library of America, 2006)

Non-fiction

• Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (Anchor, 2005)