Wallace was named after his maternal grandfather, a bookkeeper and Talmudic scholar of Narewka, Poland.

He collaborated on such films as The West Point Story (1950), Split Second (1953), Meet Me at the Fair (1953), and The Big Circus (1959).

He published his first non-fiction work in 1955, The Fabulous Originals, and his first fiction offering, The Sins of Philip Fleming, in 1959.

She also helped him to produce, along with their two children, The Book of Lists#2 and The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People.

Several of Wallace's books have been made into films, including The Chapman Report, The Man, The Seven Minutes and New Delhi.

In his autobiography Another Life, Korda suggests that Wallace invented a style of novel that is at once a strong story and encyclopedia, with "some sex thrown in to keep the reader's pulse going.