Gifted American poet, scholar, and translator, Robert Stuart Fitzgerald, was born in Springfield, Illinois. He lost both his parents and his younger brother to illnesses when he was still a child. He attended The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall). Later he returned to Springfield and enrolled in high school there.

He was a very active and engaged student, involved in academics, sports, and the debate team. He played the position of quarterback on the high school football team during his senior year. Upon high school graduation from Springfield High School in 1928, he entered Harvard University, where he was rigorously trained in the classics.

His translations from Greek to English are still considered standard texts. Of particular note are his translations of Homer and Virgil. According to Denis Camp, professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, Fitzgerald "made the classics so readable." Camp continued, "after the tiresome Victorian translations...it was a breath of fresh air to read a Fitzgerald."

Fitzgerald served in the United States Navy during World War II. He was based in Guam and Pearl Harbor. He was the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, and appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He developed close friendships with authors James Agee, Flannery O'Connor, and William Maxwell. Later in life he stated that his interest in writing was first formed in high school. "I discovered that I could put words together," he said. "And the results were pleasing to me."

Fitzgerald traveled the world, living in Italy for six years, but he never lost his love for Springfield. Before he began his teaching career, he worked as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and Time magazine. His memoirs of growing up in Springfield appeared in The New Yorker. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Princeton University before accepting a position at Harvard University. He taught there until his retirement in 1981.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Harvard class of 1933, Fitzgerald offered the following: "So hard at best is the lot of man, and so great is the beauty he can apprehend...our lifetimes have seen the opening of abysses before which the mind quails. But it seems to me there are a few things everyone can humbly try to hold onto: love and mercy (and humor) in everyday living; the quest for exact truth in language and affairs of the intellect; self-recollection or prayer; and the peace, the composed energy of art."

Fitzgerald married three times. In late life he moved to Connecticut, where he died after an illness. In October 2010, the City of Springfield honored Fitzgerald with a historical marker placed at the location where his home once stood. Organizers of the event chose that date to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Fitzgerald's birth.