Chester Linn Shaver, the son of a lawyer, was born in Somerset, Pennsylvania, on November 23, 1907. Educated at Oberlin College (A.B., 1928 Phi Beta Kappa) and Harvard University (A.M., 1929, Ph.D., 1937), Shaver joined the English Department at Oberlin in 1930, serving as chairman of the department from 1952 to 1955 and from 1964 to 1970. He married Alice Louise Crafts (A.B. Oberlin, 1936; B.S. Simmons, 1937) on June 14, 1937, and they had two children: Philip Alcott (b. 1938) and Anne Elizabeth (b. 1941), both of whom are Oberlin graduates.

Shaver, who became interested in William Wordsworth when he was an undergraduate at Oberlin in the 1920s, devoted his scholarly life to studying the English poet. Over four decades Shaver was the eighteenth century English literature specialist in the Department of English. Like so many of his colleagues, he was of the "old school" where the professor largely lectured from prepared notes. In love with his subject, Shaver's manner, included an enthusiastic, distilled response to the Romantics. His interests in English and photography were joined in a frequently used classroom slide presentation on Wordsworth and Coleridge. He also diligently served on many faculty committees and was the advisor on acquisitions for the Library.

Over the years, Shaver published a number of articles on Wordsworth as well as Byron, Keats and Chaucer. He also served on the editorial board of the quarterly "The Wordsworth Circle." He undertook a major editing project when he prepared a revised edition of Ernest de Selincourt's The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787-1805, published by Oxford University's Clarendon Press in 1967. This volume's importance is in the addition of letters, which were not included in the first edition or any successive editions. Shaver wrote the piece on Wordsworth in the "Encyclopedia International." His research took him to England, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Western Germany.

Following the completion of The Early Years, his greatest achievement, he began compiling Wordsworth's Library: A Catalogue. With the help of his wife, Alice, he created an entire listing of the books that were owned by William Wordsworth and housed at his home, Rydal Mount. The book's scholarly significance is in the correlation between what Wordsworth read and the influence it had on his writing. This connection could not be fully understood previously because published listings of his library were incomplete.

Chester Shaver died of cancer on 2 February 1980 at Elyria Memorial Hospital after several years of illness. Alice Shaver died on December 2, 2003 in Oberlin.