John Worthen taught at universities in North America and Wales before becoming Professor of D.H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he remains Emeritus Professor. His inaugural lecture as Professor of D.H. Lawrence Studies was published under the title Cold Hearts and Coronets. His career as Lawrence’s biographer began in the 1980s and culminated in the celebrated D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912, the first part of the definitive three-volume Cambridge biography. Material from this project later formed the foundation of Worthen's single volume study, D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider.
Though based in Lawrence’s hometown of Nottingham, he has researched and travelled around the world to complete this portrait of the writer. In 2001 he published a group biography of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle entitled The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons, and the Wordsworths in 1802; in 2007 he published a life of the musician Robert Schumann and since then has completed a short biography of T.S. Eliot, an Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge for Cambridge University Press, a volume of unpublished lectures on D.H.