After attending Spiru Haret High School in his native city from 1932 to 1940, he enrolled in the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest.

He obtained a doctorate in 1947, with a thesis on the sensation novel in Romanian literature during the latter half of the 19th century;[1] his adviser was George Călinescu.

[1] His time there was interrupted in March 1959, when he was arrested and ensnared in a plot concocted by the communist regime's Securitate secret police.

In reality, the alleged conspirators did not know one another, and the Romanian Communist Party wished to deliver a lesson to rising intellectuals.

This featured poems by his father and by Barbu, Tudor Arghezi, George Bacovia, Lucian Blaga, Benjamin Fondane, Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea, and Vasile Voiculescu.