Bezanson graduated from Needham High School in and received his undergraduate from Dartmouth College. He then joined a group of graduate students at Yale University who worked under Stanley Williams, who encouraged them to explore the then neglected works and life of Herman Melville. He left graduate school to become a lieutenant and an instructor in the U.S. Naval Air Force, 1943–46. He was on the aircraft carrier Intrepid off the coast of Japan when the war ended. He taught in the English Department at Harvard for three years, but was attracted to the greater freedom and opportunity to build new programs at Rutgers University, where he taught for the next 35 years.
