[1] At age 18 he printed and bound a limited edition of Solomon's Cat, a previously unpublished poem by Walter Duranty,[2] setting the type and engraving the illustrations.

In "A Nest of Gentlefolk", (winner of the 1949 Furioso Prize) he describes the CIC's futile search for Nazi war criminals in the war-ravaged town of Hohenlohe;[10] in The Thin Voice[11] he describes the unsuccessful attempt by an American officer to prevent some freed Russian POWs from killing a vicious collaborator in Heiligenkreuz, Germany;[12] in "The End of Pity" he tells the story of a woman's suicide after visiting her ruined house in a combat zone in Oberkassel;[13] and in "The Mind is its Own Place" he describes his brief post-war encounter in Karuizawa, Japan with Captain Kermit Beahan, bombardier of the bomber "The Bockscar" who released the atomic bomb over Nagasaki.

Macauley described Beahan as "a young captain with a college-boy face [who] had suffered some strange mutation of feeling so deep and so destructive..."[14] According to Macauley's letters archived at the University of North Carolina, while in Karuizawa he was friends with former Japanese Ambassador to the US Saburō Kurusu and German Admiral Paul Wenneker, as well as pianist Leo Sirota and artist Paul Jacoulet.

[15] He was also acquainted with three-time former Japanese Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe, to whom he presented a copy of The American Leviathan: The Republic in the Machine Age, written by Charles A.

During 1947 he taught at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop with Paul Engle, and Anthony Hecht (with whom Macauley had served during World War II), where he befriended Flannery O'Connor,[24] advising her on drafts of her first novel, Wise Blood.

[29] Macauley assisted in the publication of Quadrant magazine (edited by James McAuley), an Australian literary journal that at the time had "an anticommunist thrust".

[32][33][34] Ransom described Macauley as "wise and thorough, thoroughly experienced, an excellent critic...; a pretty good fiction writer who has just begun to get a lot better; and a person universally admired and liked.

[44] David H. Lynn, writing in The Kenyon Review, said that "in the years when he was fiction editor, Playboy was second only to The New Yorker in prestige as a place for serious writers to display their talents.

[48] He later taught at the Harvard Extension School and during 1990 co-initiated and co-directed the Ploughshares International Writing Seminars,[49] a summer program of the Emerson College European Center at Kasteel Well in the Netherlands.

"Robie Macauley's prose, like the best poetry, has a startling economy of means and precision of language", declared Melvin J. Friedman in Contemporary Novelists.

"The author's work", continued Friedman, "is the enviable product of years spent in close and sympathetic relationship with the best novels from Jane Austen through James Joyce.