His Checkerboard Trilogy, consisting of the works Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963) was included by literary critic Larry McCaffery in his list of the 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction.

As an infant he and his older brother Gordon were sent to Bonnie Brae, an Episcopal boarding school in nearby Liberty Corners, New Jersey, which he called Prettyfields, which he features in his 1969 novel The Bamboo Bed.

In the early 1940s, he worked at the Stanley Rose Bookstore in Los Angeles, California, which was a literary hangout for writers Nathanael West, Clifford Odets, Theodore Dreiser, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck et al.

His unit then landed at Omaha Beach, after which he fought in France and Belgium, and was a platoon leader when wounded in the right shoulder in the 1944 Battle of the Bulge, receiving a steel plate that hampered movement of his arm.

Though he was awarded the Bronze Star for his service, he repeatedly declined to talk about it; companion Marilyn Hill explained that he was embarrassed by the fact that it wasn't enemy fire that wounded him, but his own gun that had misfired, blasting shrapnel into his shoulder.