With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life, writing in multiple genres.

With Blue Eyes (1975), the debut of detective character Isaac Sidel, Charyn attracted wide attention and acclaim.

Novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong".

Charyn serves on the advisory board of the Laboratoire d'Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA), a research centre at Aix-Marseille University.

What impressed Charyn most was the narrative voice of sleuth Lew Archer—at once sympathetic and detached, who "deliver[s] both a landscape and a past without least hint of sentimentality.

"[5] The experiences of Charyn's brother, Harvey, an NYPD homicide detective, added authenticity to this popular series, which attracted a cult following worldwide.

More recently, in April 2012, Otto Penzler, founder of Mysterious Press, reissued the entire series as eBooks, co-published by Open Road Media.

[10] The October 2012, publication of Under the Eye of God, the first new Sidel thriller in a decade, rebooted the series ahead of a planned adult animated TV drama, to be titled Hard Apple.

[11] Charyn's eight graphic novels were teamed him up with artists like Jacques de Loustal, José Antonio Muñoz and François Boucq, together with whom he won the 1998 Angoulême Grand Prix.

Some critics felt that Charyn was much too brazen in writing in poet Emily Dickinson's voice and surrounding her with invented characters.

Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Review of Books, said: "Of literary sleights of hand none is more exhilarating for the writer, as none is likely to be riskier, than the appropriation of another—classic—writer's voice.

Assuming her voice, he narrates Dickinson's "secret life" to the reader, delving into her childhood, romantic involvements, even her final illness and death.

[20] In 1968, Charyn joined Noam Chomsky, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag, Thomas Pynchon, Henry Miller, James Baldwin and more than 400 others in signing the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

[21] Charyn has lived in Greenwich Village, the Bronx, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, California, Houston, Austin, Texas, Paris and Barcelona.