Leithauser was born in 1953 in Detroit, Michigan. He is an alumnus of the Cranbrook Kingswood School and a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He worked for three years as a research fellow at the Kyoto Comparative Law Center in Japan. Leithauser has lived in Japan, Italy, England, Iceland, and France. His wife, the poet Mary Jo Salter, is also a professor at Mount Holyoke. As of January, 2007, both Leithauser and his wife will have permanently joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Leithauser's work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Time, and The New Yorker.

Leithauser is the uncle and godfather of Hamilton Leithauser, lead singer of The Walkmen.

Poetry collections

• Hundreds of Fireflies (1982)
• Cats of the Temple (1986)
• The Mail from Anywhere (1990)
• The Odd Last Thing She Did (1998)
• Curves and Angles (2006)

Novels

• Equal Distance (1985)
• Hence (1989)
• Seaward (1993)
• The Friends of Freeland (1997)
• A Few Corrections (2001)
• Darlington's Fall: A Novel in Verse (2002)
• The Art Student's War (2009)

Essay collections

• Penchants and Places (1995)

Edited volumes

• The Norton Book of Ghost Stories (1994) ISBN 0-393-03564-6