Beston was born in Gundagai in 1930, where his father was the magistrate. The family moved next to Tenterfield, then Cooma, then Parkes, where Beston completed his High School in 1945. He took a BA Honours in English at Sydney University in 1949, taught briefly in NSW high schools, then went to Harvard University on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1955. He returned to the USA on the Saltonstall Pacific Fellowship from Harvard University in 1960, completed his PhD and taught in several US Colleges, in Virginia and New York. In 1970 he was awarded a three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Queensland to write on Patrick White.
Beston married Rose Marie Beattie in 1970 and they collaborated on quite a number of articles. Beston taught for a time at the University of Queensland and also in Perth. In 1976, due to the lack of an academic career path for his wife, Beston moved again to the USA.
Apart from one visit in 1990, Beston did not reside in Australia again until 2000. He wrote that by that time he found a country that was 'efficient, affluent, neither defensive nor jingoistic. Wanting to feel reconciled to the land I had loved as a child, I resumed Australian citizenship in 2003 while continuing to hold American citizenship.'
From 2002 until 2006 Beston spent half the year in Coffs Harbour and half in Santa Fe. In 2006 he and his wife Rose Marie Beston immigrated permanently to Australia and moved to Coffs Harbour. (Source: Author's Note to 'Will Voss Endure? : Fifty Years Later', published in Antipodes vol.17 no.1, June 2003, p.55)
