in sociology from the University of Minnesota after which there were many years of freelance work and odd jobs, before teaching writing in the 80s.

From 1989 to 2001 he was the Luce Professor of Arts and Politics at Kenyon College in Ohio.

Beginning in 2006 he served as the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon, and a visiting fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center.

Hyde's popular works of scholarship, including the books The Gift (1983) and Trickster Makes this World (1998), have been widely praised by writers of fiction, including Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and David Foster Wallace.

Robert Darnton in The New York Times called Hyde's book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), "an eloquent and erudite plea for protecting our cultural patrimony from appropriation by commercial interests.