He went from a local grammar school to study English at Downing College, Cambridge under F. R. Leavis and then spent three years teaching at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
He was then responsible for the third volume of the new Cambridge biography of D. H. Lawrence (Dying Game)[2] which was short-listed for the James Tait Black award.
In a review[4] of Death and the Author, Peter Balbert of Trinity University wrote " LET ME BE PRECISE and unequivocal here.
David Ellis, the distinguished critic and the author of the third and final volume of the Cambridge life of D.H.Lawrence, now has written nothing less than a masterpiece of biography, intellectual history, and medical inquiry in a study that is simultaneously wide-ranging and sharply focused. "
Ellis is the author of two memoirs, Memoirs of a Leavisite: The decline and fall of Cambridge English (2013) and Frank Cioffi: the philosopher in shirt-sleeves (2015) and has kept up his interest in Romantic writers with Byron in Geneva: That summer of 1816 (2011) and, most recently, The Story of Stendhal and British Culture (2018).