Pearce has written biographies of literary figures, often Christian, including William Shakespeare, J. R. R. Tolkien, Oscar Wilde, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Hilaire Belloc.

[P 2] At 15, Pearce joined the youth wing of the National Front, an antisemitic and white supremacist political party advocating the compulsory repatriation of all legal immigrants and British-born non-Whites.

[6] As a spokesman for the Strasserite Political Soldier faction within the NF, Pearce argued for white supremacy, publishing the Fight for Freedom!

[7] At the same time, however, Pearce adopted the group's support for ethnopluralism, contacting the Iranian embassy in London in 1984 in a vain attempt to secure funding from the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Pearce notably argued, based on the writings of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, for distributism as an alternative to both Marxism and Laissez faire Capitalism in a 1987 article for the party magazine Vanguard.

Its contribution, Corrin wrote, is its focus on Chesterton's religious vision and personal relationships, contrasting his friendly style with the combative Belloc.

In a review for The Wildean Michael Seeney described Pearce's biography as "badly written and muddled", "woefully poorly annotated" and using "odd sources without question".

In 1997, the British people, in a nationwide poll by the Folio Society, voted The Lord of the Rings the greatest book of the 20th-century and the outraged reactions of literary celebrities such as Howard Jacobson, Griff Rhys Jones, and Germaine Greer, inspired Pearce to write the books[17] Tolkien: Man and Myth (1998), Tolkien, a Celebration (1999) and Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in The Hobbit (2012).

[19] Pearce married Susannah Brown, an Irish-American woman with family roots in Dungannon, County Tyrone, in St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church in Steubenville, Ohio in April 2001.

"[P 4] The first issue of the Catholic literary magazine the St. Austin Review, which Pearce has coedited ever since alongside Robert Asch, was also published in September 2001.

In response, Pearce described "the neo-formalist revival" inspired by the late Richard Wilbur and how it has been reflected in recent verse by the Catholic poets whom he and Robert Asch publish in the St. Austin Review.