[1][2][3] His father, John Trotwood Moore, was a novelist and local historian who served as the State Librarian and Archivist from 1919 to 1929.

[4] His paternal grandfather was a lawyer from Marion, Alabama, who served in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.

[10] By 1943, in the Boston number of the Medical Clinics of North America, he argued that adult neurosis and alcoholism could be prevented if parents ensured children matched the skills of their peers and never "go off the track of normal development".

[11] He also published articles in medical journals about "drug addiction, suicide, venereal disease [...], the psychoneurosis of war, migraine headaches.

[12] During World War II, Moore served as a psychiatrist in the United States Army's Bougainville Campaign as well as in New Zealand.

[3] After the war, Moore played a key behind-the-scenes role in the Ezra Pound controversy, as a member of a group of literary men who saw to it that the modernist icon escaped a treason trial for his radio propaganda in support of Mussolini.

Moore was a close friend of one of the psychiatrists on a diagnostic panel that found Pound unfit to stand trial.

Although some of his work, such as the posthumous quatrain collection The Phoenix and the Bees, is in other forms, the poet-psychiatrist wrote and archived his poems in a dedicated home office he called his "sonnetorium."