John Livingston Lowes (December 20, 1867 – August 15, 1945) was an American scholar and critic of English literature, specializing in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Geoffrey Chaucer.

[2] From 1909 to 1918 he worked as an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also served as dean of arts and sciences.

[7] Lowes' most famous work is The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Houghton Mifflin, 1927), which examines the sources of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan.

Using Coleridge's notebook and other papers at the Bristol Library, Lowes put together a list of books that the poet read before and during the time he composed his poems.

Though later critics have disputed both Lowes' findings and method, The Road to Xanadu,[8] according to English author Toby Litt, is "a book of a lifetime": "Its argument, that Coleridge had one of the most extraordinary minds the world has ever seen, is there on every page"; it "is one of the books which helped me understand what writing is.