Hamblin grew up in Brice's Cross Roads. He attended Baldwyn, Mississippi public schools and graduated from Booneville High School. After attending Northeast Mississippi Community College, he graduated from Delta State University in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in English education. He went on to gain his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Mississippi in 1965 and 1976, respectively. Hamblin entered the teaching profession at Sparrows Point High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, where he taught English and coached baseball. He began teaching at Southeast Missouri State in 1965 and became the founding director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at the university in 1989. His interest in Faulkner began when Hamblin was in graduate school. As integration occurred at the University of Mississippi, "Faulkner helped me," he said, through the author's treatment of "racial justice, equality and brotherhood and atoning for the sins of the past." Both his master's thesis and his doctoral dissertation focused on topics related to Faulkner. In addition to Hamblin's classroom teaching, he led seminars for the Missouri Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities and lectured and led seminars about Faulkner across the United States and in China, England, Japan, the Netherlands, Romania, and Taiwan. In 2005, he was the leader of Oprah's Book Club's online discussion of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The study was part of Oprah Winfrey's Summer of Faulkner. He also edited a newsletter focused on teaching the writings of Faulkner in secondary- and university-level classes and published a variety of works about the author, including Myself & the World: A Biography of William Faulkner. In addition to his writings about Faulkner, Hamblin's published works cover a variety of topics, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He served as poetry editor for a journal about sports literature and was associate editor of a poetry magazine. He is married to Kaye Hamblin - Wikipedia