He was the author of a series of Pulitzer-Prize-winning popular histories of the American West and for many years wrote The Easy Chair, an influential column in Harper's Magazine.

His friend and biographer, Wallace Stegner described DeVoto as "flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, ... often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull.

[2] DeVoto's father was a Catholic of Italian descent, an educated, impoverished man; his mother was the daughter of a Mormon farmer; and their son was not accepted by either community.

[2][5][6] A series of articles he published in Harper's Magazine is credited with bringing the influential work of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto to wide audiences.

But a great part of what he writes is not fiction at all: it is only material with which he has struggled but which has defeated him... Until Mr. Wolfe develops more craftsmanship, he will not be the important novelist he is now widely accepted as being."

The decade between 1943 and 1953 saw the completion of what John L. Thomas called DeVoto's "magnificent trilogy of the discovery, settling, and exploitation of the West":[11] The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943); Across the Wide Missouri (1947); The Course of Empire (1952).

As early as 1938, when the Dies Committee was investigating radical professors and a Soviet takeover of America, DeVoto "mocked the conspiracy nuts"[16] and yet was called "fascist" by the liberal critics.

[22] In April 1953, DeVoto's Easy Chair column criticized "The Case of the Censorious Congressman" during Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and House Un-American Activities Committeehearings of teachers.

Child had written a fan letter to Bernard DeVoto regarding an article of his in Harper's Magazine; he had said that he detested stainless steel knives, and she thought he was "100% right".