George Alexander Kennedy was born in Hartford, Connecticut on November 26, 1928. He received his Ph.D. in classics from Harvard University in 1954 with a dissertation entitled "Prolegomena and Commentary to Quintilian VIII (PR. & 1-3)". Kennedy taught classics, comparative literature, and rhetoric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for twenty-eight years. He retired as George L. Paddison professor of classics. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1959.^[4] He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. Under President Jimmy Carter and President Ronald Reagan, Kennedy served on the National Council on the Humanities^[5] and was also president of the American Philological Association and of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric.^[2]

Kennedy served as the editor of the American Journal of Philology.^[2]

George A. Kennedy died in Spring, Texas on July 28, 2022, at the age of 93.^[6]

• 1989-2013. The Cambridge history of literary criticism. Cambridge University Press.
• 1994. A new history of classical rhetoric : with additional discussion of late Latin rhetoric. Princeton University Press.