Krupat was born in 1941 in the Bronx, New York and grew up in the Jacob Riis Housing Projects on the lower east side of Manhattan. He went to public grade school and then to Stuyvesant High School, from which he graduated in 1958. He attended New York University's Washington Square College of Arts and Science on scholarship, earning his Bachelor's degreesumma cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1962. From 1962 to 1963, he spent a year at the Universite de Strasbourg on a Fulbright Fellowship. After returning to New York, he entered graduate school at Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship. He received his Ph.D from Columbia with honors in 1967. ;Family In 1962, Krupat married Kitty Weiss; the couple divorced in 1966. In 1968, he married Cynthia Muser. While the couple divorced in 1993, together, they had two children. Their daughter, Tanya, is a social worker with the Osborne Association in New York, and lives in Brooklyn with her son, Arlo Krupat. Their son, Jeremy, is a Professor at the Business School at Cambridge University. In 2007, Krupat married Andrea Ferster, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. They were divorced in 2012. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
Professional background
;Academic work From 1965 to 1968, Krupat taught in the English Department at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He started teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York in 1968. He retired in June 2012. ;Writing While teaching at Sarah Lawrence, Krupat developed an interest in critical theory and Native American literature. His first book, For Those Who Come After: a Study of Native American Autobiography, was published in 1985. A second edition, with a foreword by Paul John Eakin, appeared in 1987. In 1989, he published a novel, Woodsmen, or Thoreau & the Indians, and in 2012 What-to-do? a novel. He has also authored, edited, or co-edited 12 more books. His most recent publications are Changed Forever: American Indian Boarding-School Literature, volume 1 published in 2018, and volume 2, 2020. He is also the author of Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature; The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon; and Red Matters. In 2007, he wrote All That Remains: Native Studies. He was the editor of a number of anthologies, including Native American Autobiography: An Anthology and New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. In 2001, he edited Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, with Brian Swann. The work was honored with the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award for best book of nonfiction prose. Krupat has contributed chapters to edited books, and his essays have appeared in the major professional journals. He has been the editor for Native American literature for the Norton Anthology of American Literature from its 5th to its 8th edition. He has presented talks at colleges and universities throughout the United States as well as in Brazil, Cyprus, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and Wales.
Fellowships
Krupat is a recipient of six fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Sarah Lawrence Excellence in Teaching Award.
Baym, Nina; Franklin, Wayne; Gura, Philip F.; Krupat, Arnold; and Levine, Robert S.. Norton Anthology of American Literature, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2007.
