He published Kurt Vonnegut's first short story and with his wife he founded Knox Burger & Associates, a literary agency.
In a B-29 bomb squadron in the Marianas, Burger covered a number of missions over Japan, and was transferred to the Yank Saipan bureau late summer 1945 just before the Japanese surrender.
Burger moved north to Tokyo, where he was, for a few months, the editor of the Far East edition of Yank, and wrote numerous stories about the occupation.
[1] After the war, Burger worked as the fiction editor of Collier's from 1948 to 1951, where in 1950 he accepted Kurt Vonnegut's first published short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect”.
He then moved on to editing for Dell from 1951 to 1960 and Fawcett Publications in 1960, joining the latter's Gold Medal line, where he worked on the release of John D. MacDonald's first three Travis McGee novels.