[1][2] His father was a district attorney in New York City and the author of the popular "Ephraim Tutt" stories that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in the 1930s and 1940s.

[2][3] In 1953, he co-founded and became the first managing editor of The Paris Review, which won attention by publishing extended interviews with such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder and William Faulkner.

He was the founder-chairman of the Train Foundation, which since 2000 has annually awarded the Civil Courage Prize for "steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk."

[citation needed] Train received part-time appointments from Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton as a director of government agencies and entities dealing with Africa, Asia, and Central Europe, respectively.

[citation needed] In 1980, he helped to establish the Afghanistan Relief Committee to provide medicine and food to the victims of the Soviet invasion, serving first as its treasurer and later as president.

[citation needed] Train was a descendant of an old New England family, he was a cousin of the late United States Senator Claiborne Pell, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and of Russell E. Train, head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon and a founding trustee/former chairman of the World Wildlife Fund.