Samuel Phillips Savage was born in 1940 in Camden, South Carolina. His father, Henry Savage Jr., a lawyer by profession, was also an author, publishing several books of history and natural history.
Savage graduated from Yale University in 1968. He subsequently studied philosophy at Yale and at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, receiving a Phd from Yale University with a dissertation on the political thought of Thomas Hobbes. He also taught at Yale, in his words "briefly and unhappily."
Prior to attending Yale he was poetry editor of Reflections, a small literary magazine published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the early 1960s and was active in the Civil Rights Movement. After leaving Yale Savage spent several years in France. He returned to South Carolina in 1980, settling in the small coastal village of McClellanville. In 2004 he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he now lives. Before writing, he worked as a bicycle mechanic, carpenter, crab fisherman, and letterpress printer.
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