Klinkenborg was raised on an Iowa farm belonging to his family.He attended elementary school in Clarion, Iowa until the 6th grade at which time the family moved to Osage. He graduated from Pomona College, and holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Klinkenborg taught literature and creative writing at Fordham University while living in the Bronx in the early to mid-1980s, and later at St. Olaf College, Bennington College and Harvard University. In 1991 he received the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writer's Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He lives on a small farm in upstate New York.

His most notable current writings are his editorial opinions which appear regularly in the New York Times; these are generally literary meditations on rural farm life. He was the 2006-2007 visiting writer-in-residence at Pomona College, where he taught nonfiction writing. In 2007, he received a Guggenheim fellowship, which will fund his upcoming book The Mermaids of Lapland, about William Cobbett.

2006 blog

In the first half of 2006, he posted a farm and garden blog about The Rural Life, consisting of entries from the daily journal kept by Gilbert White in Selborne in 1784, and his own complementary daily entries.

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