Born in Alliance, Ohio, he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1946 during World War II.
He served as the Frederick F. Seely Professor of English at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, from the 1950s until his retirement in the mid-1980s.
During the 1979–1980 academic year, Kern was the distinguished visiting professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, an academic experience which inspired several articles relating the arts to the military.
[1] During the 1980s, he experimented with writing poetry, using computers with an Allegheny College colleague, James Sheridan.
According to a family member, he lived in Pittsburgh for roughly ten years after retiring from Allegheny College (from approximately 1987 to 1996), where he is still remembered.