[1] Walsh attended high school at the now-closed Power Memorial Academy in Manhattan,[2] and after his senior year, enlisted in the US Army, serving in the infantry in Trieste, Italy, from 1946 to 1948.
Following his two years of service, he enrolled at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, but dropped out to take a job as a reporter The Oneonta Daily Star.
Walsh's time at Reader's Digest marked an ambitious and unprecedented project: the condensation of the Bible, an enterprise that would make him and his colleagues well known on a national scale.
He told The New York Times in 1982:''We condensed a 14-volume set of 56 classics for young readers in the late 1960s, but the Bible had always been considered the ultimate challenge.
"[2] However, his early doubts were replaced by satisfaction in the end, telling the New York Times 'Our Bible is still the word of God, but it's easier to get into and stay with and appreciate.
He was moderately well known in the historical nonfiction and literary biographical genres, some of his better known books being The Bones of Saint Peter: The First Full Account of the Discovery of the Apostle's Tomb, Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind "The Mystery of Marie Roget", and Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution.
[2] His only award-winning publication was Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind "The Mystery of Marie Roget", which won an Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime in 1969.
[1] He died on March 19, 2015, in a Monroe hospital, leaving behind nine unpublished texts, on such wide-ranging topics as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, the Shroud of Turin, Pearl Harbor,[5] and two mystery novels.