He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Grand Master of SF since 2004.

While at Columbia he wrote the juvenile novel Revolt on Alpha C (1955), published by Thomas Y. Crowell with the cover notice: "A gripping story of outer space".

He was writing a quarter of a million words a month"[12] under many different pseudonyms[13] including about 200 erotic novels published as Don Elliott.

[14][15] In a 2000 interview, Silverberg explained that the erotic fiction "... was undertaken at a time when I was saddled with a huge debt, at the age of 26, for a splendid house that I had bought.

[11] Thus inspired, Silverberg returned to the field that gave him his start, paying far more attention to depth of character development and social background than he had in the past and mixing in elements of the modernist literature he had studied at Columbia.

[17] Perhaps the first book to indicate the new Silverberg was To Open the Sky, a fixup of stories published by Pohl in Galaxy Magazine, in which a new religion helps people reach the stars.

That was followed by Downward to the Earth, a story containing echoes of material from Joseph Conrad's work,[14] in which the human former administrator of an alien world returns after the planet's inhabitants have been set free.

After suffering through the stresses of a major house fire[19] and a thyroid malfunction, Silverberg moved from his native New York City to the West Coast in 1972, and he announced his retirement from writing in 1975.

[9] Before the age of 30, Silverberg was independently wealthy through his investments, and once owned the former mansion of New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.