Baruth earned a B.A. in English from Brown University in 1984 and a PhD from the University of California, Irvine in 1993. He is Professor of English at the University of Vermont, where he has served on the faculty since 1993.
In 2010, Baruth was elected to the Senate of the State of Vermont, where he served as Majority Leader from 2013 until 2017.
Baruth is best known in Boswellian circles for his 2009 novel "The Brothers Boswell", a fictional but well-researched story about the relationship between brothers James and John Boswell.
Before this, Baruth had written about the Boswell-Johnson relationship in his Honors thesis as an undergraduate, as well as in his PhD dissertation. He has also published a number of articles on the topic, including "Something Old, Something New: Two Recent (and Contradictory) Portraits of James Boswell" (2002) in the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies, although this is more of a review of two different biographies of Boswell, rather than research about Boswell himself.