Leo Strauss was born in the Hessian town of Kirchhain in Germany on September 20, 1899. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family and received a pre–World War I gymnasium education. He took degrees at the University of Marburg and the University of Hamburg, where he studied with the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. In a postdoctoral year at Freiburg, he worked with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, but was more impressed with Husserl's young assistant, a man named Martin Heidegger. Strauss's professional career began as an assistant at the Academy for Jewish Research in Berlin where he coedited some of the early volumes of the jubilee edition of the writings of Moses Mendelssohn. It was here also that he wrote his first book, Die Religionskritik Spinozas, which was dedicated to the memory of Franz Rosenzweig.

Strauss left Germany in 1932 to spend a year in Paris before moving to England to carry out research on Thomas Hobbes. In 1938 he emigrated with his wife Miriam to the United States; at the age of almost forty he took up his first teaching position at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he spent the next decade. In 1949 he accepted a position in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago where he was to have his greatest influence. Several important works, including Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Natural Right and History (1953), Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), and What Is Political Philosophy? (1959), followed in rapid succession. Strauss retired from the university in 1968, and after spending a year at Claremont Men's College in California, he joined his old friend Jacob Klein at Saint John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. He continued to write and publish to the very end of his life, his last competed book being a study of Plato's Laws. Strauss died on October 18, 1973.