R.R. Palmer was born in Chicago. After graduating from the University of Chicago, he received his PhD from Cornell University in 1934. From 1936 to 1963 he taught at Princeton University, taking leave during World War II to work on historical projects in Washington, DC. In 1963 he moved to Washington University in St. Louis to serve as dean of arts and sciences, and in 1969 he resumed his career in teaching and research, this time at Yale. After his retirement he lived in Princeton, where he was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study, and then in a retirement community in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Of the numerous books he wrote, translated, and edited, three of the most important are his Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (1939); Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (1941, 1989); and his two-volume Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959, 1964), the first volume of which won the Bancroft Prize. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1970, received honorary degrees from universities in the United States and abroad, and was awarded the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for History in Rome in 1990. He was a long-time Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died in 2002, widely recognized as one of the preeminent historians of his generation.