Walt was born Oct. 31, 1929, in Nashville to Lucile Courtney and A. Walton Litz. At Princeton he majored in English, roomed with Grady Miller, and was on the editorial board of the Nassau Lit. Walt was a member of Court Club and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation, he earned a Ph.D. from Oxford while studying on a Rhodes scholarship at Merton College in 1954.
He became a professor of English literature at Princeton in 1956 and served as chair of the English department from 1974 to 1981. Walt was a longtime instructor at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. In 1989, he was named to the Eastman Visiting Professorship at Balliol College, Oxford.
Walt is perhaps best known as the author or editor of more than 20 collections of literary criticism, including major editions of Pound, Joyce, Williams, Stevens, and Eliot. He was an American Council of Learned Societies fellow, a recipient of the E. Harris Harbison Award for Gifted Teaching, and a Guggenheim fellow.
Walt died June 4, 2014, and is survived by his children, Katharine, Andrew, Victoria, and Emily; and six grandchildren. His former wife, Marian, died Oct. 14, 2014.