[1] Victor Bromberg was born in Berlin on November 11, 1923, into a well-to-do Russian-Jewish family that had fled Russia at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and settled in Leipzig.

As the German army advanced on Paris in 1940, the family fled to the unoccupied zone under the control of the Vichy government and a year later, in 1941, escaped via Spain to the United States, settling in New York.

In 1950, he married Beth Archer, a translator from French and Italian, and the author of the biographies Cristina: Portraits of a Princess and Édouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat.

Brombert's work was primarily on 19th and 20th century French literature, and also on the history of ideas; the theory of literary criticism; and comparative studies of Italian, Russian, and German narrative writers.

[7][8] In the words of a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal (December 27, 2013), “Victor Brombert...has been for more than 50 years one of the glories of humanistic scholarship at Yale and Princeton.

Though a generation younger than scholarly patriarchs like Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, Mr. Brombert has nonetheless shown himself comparably learned and cosmopolitan in his studies...” Principal Works of Literary Criticism: as Editor: