Under Abrams's editorship, The Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation.

Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, Abrams was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

"[2] After earning his bachelor's degree in 1934, Abrams won a Henry Fellowship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his tutor was I.

The literary critics Harold Bloom, Gayatri Spivak and E. D. Hirsch, and the novelists William H. Gass and Thomas Pynchon were among his students.

[14] In 1998, Modern Library ranked The Mirror and the Lamp one of the 100 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.