[5][6][7][8] Wylie grew up in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, from which he was dismissed in 1965; an interview with his university alumni magazine stated that this was for arranging illicit excursions to Boston for fellow students and supplying them, illegally, with alcohol.
[9] When he was a teenager, he spent 9 months in Manhattan's Payne Whitney clinic, a psychiatric hospital, for punching a police officer.
In a 2007 interview, fellow agent Ira Silverberg suggested that Wylie has since attempted to acquire the remaining copies of the collection.
[12] Wylie founded the literary agency named after himself in New York in 1980 with a $10,000 loan from his mother.
[9] In July 2010, Wylie launched a new business, Odyssey Editions, to publish e-books.