Arthur Lee-Francis Askins was born in Clarkesville Arkansas, a small town in the valley of the Arkansas River, on August 9, 1934. Although it has been more than sixty years since the son of Francis and Lillian Adkins Askins has lived in Arkansas, he treasures his Arkansas relatives and roots and considers himself bi-dialectal, switching at will between the Ozark dialect of his birthplace and the academic English he learned later.

The family moved to Long Beach, California in 1940 when Arthur's father was transferred by his employer, Newberry Electric Corporation, to work on the wiring of U. S. Navy ships, a job which he held throughout World War II. After the war, the family remained in Long Beach, where Arthur's public school education took place. In high school he was, among other things, an Eagle Scout and a championship ballroom dancer. (Years later, dining with friends at an open-air restaurant in the Retiro, in Madrid, he would be hauled up on stage by an American blues singer and would impress all with his still polished moves.) As was common in California at the time, he carried out his basic college studies at a community college, Long Beach City College (1952–54), then transferred to UCLA (B.A. 1956), where he first majored in Archeology before switching to Latin American Studies. He stayed on for an M.A. in Spanish American Literature in 1958. As an archeology major he participated in a Mayan language project, which led to his writing the Mayan dialogue for an eminently forgettable science-fiction epic film, The Flame Barrier (1958), starring Kathleen Crowley and Arthur Franz.

Arthur began doctoral studies at Berkeley in 1958, when the only Ph.D. offered was in Romance Languages and Literature. In addition to Spanish, French, and Italian literature, Arthur continued with Portuguese, which he polished through study at Coimbra (1960).