Sacvan Bercovitch was a Canadian literary and cultural critic who spent most of his life teaching and writing in the United States. He received his B.A. at Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University) in 1958, and his Ph.D. at Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University) in 1965. Bercovitch taught at Brandeis, the University of California-San Diego, Princeton, and at Columbia from 1970 to 1984. From 1984 until he retired in 2001 he taught at Harvard, where he held the Powell M. Cabot Professorship in American Literature.