Hutchinson was raised in Indianapolis. As a child,he loved writing fiction,beginning in about fourth grade.[1] By high school he began to enjoy writing research papers for school,and a fascination for research as well as writing has remained throughout his life. The creative,self-expressive aspect of writing has always enthralled him. When Hutchinson was young,his mother emphasized to him being ‘modern’and open to the new but retaining a sense of quality and what will last. This emphasis may have contributed to Hutchinson's tendency to write counter to intellectual fads while trying to expand his readers' understanding of the possible in the past and present. Hutchinson was also influenced as a child by his maternal grandfather,a geologist who had a reputation for scholarly boldness and integrity.[1]
He served in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso from 1975–7,organizing well-digging projects by hand,for water,in rural villages. Within three months,he abandoned his preconceived notions,attending instead to the work at hand and the people with whom he lived.[2] While in Burkina Fasso,he read Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa:Essays on Socialism.[2] These essays had a lasting influence on Hutchinson's view of property rights and their relation to individual rights more generally,not to mention capitalist democracy itself. Hutchinson's experience as a well digger in Africa completely transformed his perspective,[1] and since then he has never quite accommodated himself to the culture and racial etiquette of his homeland.[2]
Hutchinson's second book,The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White,was published by Harvard University Press in 1995. Hutchinson was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History in 2006 for this book,which was also a finalist for the Anne Rea Jewell Non-Fiction Prize of The Boston Book Review in 1996. Following a lecture given by Hutchinson at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research in 2021,more than twenty-five years after The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White was initially published,the Afro-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. notably acknowledged the status of Hutchinson's book as "the bible on the Harlem Renaissance".[3]
In 2013,Hutchinson joined Cornell University as the Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture,where he also serves as George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. At Cornell,his teaching and research focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture,with particular attention to race in American culture,African American literature,and literary ecology.[7]
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