[1] Born in Vienna, Austria, to a family of industrialists, Franz Karl Golffing studied philosophy, art history, and literature in Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg, Freiburg, and finally Basel, where he obtained a doctorate in 1934 for his dissertation on the poetry of Friedrich Rückert.
[6] Through Brewster Ghiselin and Ray West, who curated a literary circle in Salt Lake City, he met the poet Ellis Foote, who would be a lifelong friend.
[10] In 1948, Golffing accepted a position at Bennington College, where he would teach French, English, philosophy, and semantics alongside writers including Stanley Edgar Hyman, Howard Nemerov, Bernard Malamud, Claude Fredericks, Ben Belitt, and Kenneth Burke during the school's golden age.
He remained at Bennington for twenty years, with occasional leaves to teach in Berlin (where he headed the American Institute) and Heidelberg.
[12] The poet Anne Waldman, who was one of his students, later reminisced, “I would sit in on Francis Golffing's class on Rilke simply to hear the German read out loud, though I couldn't understand it.”[13] Among his many students was the illustrator Norman Rockwell, who enrolled as an adult to take a writing class with him in 1952.
[14] In 1968, he resigned from Bennington in frustration over his low salary (Malamud expressed his sympathy),[15] and moved to Peterborough, New Hampshire to become director of Humanities at Franklin Pierce College.