Early Life and Academic Career
Gross was born and raised in London’s East End, to Abraham Gross, a Jewish immigrant from the Polish-Jewish town of Gorokhov, from where Gross’s family escaped before the entire Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust, and to Muriel Gross, also of East European Jewish origin, whose parents came from Vitebsk, an area later made famous by the paintings of Chagall. Tony Gross, who founded Cutler and Gross, an eyewear business, is his brother. Among his cousins was the composer Lionel Bart.
Gross was educated at the Perse School in Cambridge and at the City of London School. A child prodigy, he was admitted to Wadham College, Oxford aged seventeen. After gaining first class honours in English Literature at Oxford he won a fellowship at Princeton, where he undertook post-graduate studies. He then returned to England and taught at Queen Mary, University of London and at King's College, Cambridge, of which he was a fellow from 1962-65. In later life he also taught courses at Columbia and Princeton universities.
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