Hutchinson was raised in Indianapolis. As a child, he loved writing fiction, beginning in about fourth grade.^[1] By high school he began to enjoy writing research papers for school, and a fascination for research as well as writing has remained throughout his life. The creative, self-expressive aspect of writing has always enthralled him. When Hutchinson was young, his mother emphasized to him being ‘modern’ and open to the new but retaining a sense of quality and what will last. This emphasis may have contributed to Hutchinson's tendency to write counter to intellectual fads while trying to expand his readers' understanding of the possible in the past and present. Hutchinson was also influenced as a child by his maternal grandfather, a geologist who had a reputation for scholarly boldness and integrity.^[1]

He graduated from Brown University with an A.B. in American Civilization in 1975. At Brown, he won a silver medal in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association championships in 1973 and served as captain and stroke of the men's varsity crew in 1974–5.

He served in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso from 1975-7, organizing well-digging projects by hand, for water, in rural villages. Within three months, he abandoned his preconceived notions, attending instead to the work at hand and the people with whom he lived.^[2] While in Burkina Fasso, he read Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism.^[2] These essays had a lasting influence on Hutchinson's view of property rights and their relation to individual rights more generally, not to mention capitalist democracy itself. Hutchinson's experience as a well digger in Africa completely transformed his understanding of American culture and race,^[1] and since then he has never quite accommodated himself to American culture, particularly its wastefulness, its worship of money at the expense of the commonwealth, its dearth of community life, and its racial etiquette.^[2]

After graduating from Indiana University with a Ph.D. in English and American Studies in 1983, Hutchinson taught at the University of Tennessee from 1982-2000, chairing the American Studies Program from 1987-2000 and holding the Kenneth Curry Chair in English from 1999-2000. During this time, he was President of the Knoxville Rowing Association and played a vital role in establishing the university's first-ever varsity women's crew. In 1986, his first book, The Ecstatic Whitman, was published by the Ohio State Press. In 1993-4 and 1998, Hutchinson was Visiting Professor of North American Studies at the University of Bonn.

Hutchinson's second book, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, was published by Harvard University Press in 1995. Hutchinson was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History in 2006 for this book, which was also a finalist for the Rea Non-Fiction Prize of the Boston Book Review in 1996. Following a lecture given by Hutchinson at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research in 2021, more than twenty-five years after The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White was initially published by Harvard University Press, the Afro-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. notably acknowledged the status of Hutchinson's book as "the bible on the Harlem Renaissance".^[3]

From 2000 to 2012, Hutchinson was the Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, where he chaired the English department ^[4][5] .^[6] In 2006, Harvard University Press published Hutchinson's third book, In Search of Nella Larsen, the definitive biography of Larsen.

Since 2013, Hutchinson has researched and taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture at Cornell University, focusing particularly on critical questions around race and ecology.^[7] His book Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s—a work of cultural criticism and history that brings together a wide range of literature, art, philosophy and music alongside discourses on civil rights, ethnicity, gender, labor, politics and ecology—was published by Columbia University Press in 2018.

Hutchinson held a fellowship from Cornell's Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future from 2016 to 2021. He is currently working on ecologies of literary emergence in American literature, a well-digger's memoir set in the village of Zéguedéguin, Burkina Faso, and a biography of Jean Toomer.

Hutchinson was 1988 and 1989 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. He was also a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.^[8][9] His book In Search of Nella Larsen, a groundbreaking biography of the author long referred to by scholars as "the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance," ^[10] won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa and was listed by The Washington Post and Booklist as one of the best Nonfiction books of 2006. It was also selected as an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Book Review and as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine. ^[11] His book Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award in 2019 and won Honorable Mention for the Matei Călinescu Prize of the Modern Language Association, for distinguished scholarship on 20th and 21st century literature and thought. His edition of Jean Toomer's Cane (novel), published by Penguin Classics in 2019, was an Editors' Choice of the New York Times Book Review. ^{[12] [13]}

Authored edit

• The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union (PDF). Ohio State University Press. 1986. ISBN 978-0-814-20412-2.
• The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Harvard University Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0-674-37262-7.
• In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Harvard University Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-674-02180-8.
• Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s. Columbia University Press. 2018. ISBN 978-0-231-54596-9.

Edited edit

• The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Cambridge University Press. 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-67368-6.
• with John K. Young, Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850. University of Michigan Press. 2013. ISBN 978-0-472-90099-2.

^[14]

• by Anita Thompson Dickinson Reynolds and Howard Miller. American Cocktail: A "Colored Girl" in the World. Harvard University Press. 2014. ISBN 978-0-674-07305-0.
• by Jean Toomer. Cane, Penguin Books, 2019. ISBN 978-0-143-13367-4^[15]

• Nella Larsen
• Ethnic Studies
• Biographical criticism
• African American culture