David Dollenmayer was born in Tennessee and grew up in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and California. He earned his BA from Princeton in 1967 and a subsequent PhD in 1977, later attending the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich on a Fulbright Fellowship. He taught German language and literature at Middlebury College, Smith College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1988. With Thomas Hansen, he co-authored the German textbook Neue Horizante, which entered its 8th edition in 2013. Dollenmayer began translating German literary works in 2005 and has since won several awards, including the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for Moses Rosenkranz's Childhood: An Autobiographical Fragment and the Austrian Cultural Forum's translation prize in 2010 for Michael Köhlmeier's Idyll with Drowning Dog.