He was born David Robert Plante in Providence, Rhode Island, of French-Canadian and Indian descent. He is the son of Albina Bisson and Aniclet Plante. He is a graduate of Boston College and the Université catholique de Louvain. He is a retired professor of creative writing at Columbia University.

He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He has been a writer-in-residence at Gorki Institute of Literature (Moscow), the Université du Québec à Montréal, Adelphi University, King's College, the University of Cambridge, Tulsa University, and the University of East Anglia.

Plante has written in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. He lives in London.

His novels examine homosexuality in a variety of contexts, but notably in the milieu of large, working-class, Catholic families of French Canadian background. His male characters range from openly gay to sexually ambiguous.

Plante’s work, for which he has been nominated for the National Book Award, includes Difficult Women (1983), a memoir of his relationships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer and the widely-praised Francoeur Trilogy--The Family (1978), The Country (1980) and The Woods (1982).