His father Kornél was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944, but his mother and his brother Paul Tabori (writer and psychical researcher), managed to escape the Nazis.

[1] As a young man, Tabori travelled to Berlin but was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1935 because of his Jewish background.

In 1947 he emigrated to the United States, where he became a translator (mainly of works by Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch) and a screenwriter[2] including Alfred Hitchcock's movie I Confess (1953).

At the University of Pennsylvania he taught classes in dramatic writing which resulted in Werner Liepolt's The Young Master Dante and Ron Cowen's Summertree.

[3] Two of Tabori's plays in English -- The Cannibals and Pinkville—were produced by Wynn Handman at the American Place Theatre in New York City from 1968 through 1970.