Born in Hollywood, California, Young was raised in Los Angeles and San Diego and won fellowships to study writing at the University of San Diego; the University of California, Davis, where he studied with Beat Generation author Gary Snyder; and the University of Houston, in the doctoral Creative Writing Program founded by postmodern satirist Donald Barthelme. The Creative Writing Program at UC Davis awards a Master's degree that is equivalent to an M.F.A. Young's first teaching job, when he was 25, was as a civilian working on U.S. Navy ships deployed throughout the Far East. This experience would form the basis for his first novel, One of the Guys, published by HarperCollins in 1999.

When not writing, Young has been active in the anti-Iraq-war movement and was arrested twice in 2003 for nonviolent protest of the Iraq War.

One of the Guys is a satire about a man impersonating a U.S. Navy chaplain on a ship that suffers a series of comic misadventures in the Far East. The novel gained notoriety shortly after publication when the American Family Association objected to Young's portrayal of a man posing as a Christian chaplain during deployment to ports where an alcoholic crew avails itself of child prostitution. The AFA, which had previously used the work of artists to attack the funding practices of the National Endowment for the Arts, lobbied the U.S. Congress to have the agency defunded.

Young responded, in The Washington Post and elsewhere, that the controversial sections of One of the Guys were not pornographic, but had been written to expose what he saw as the U.S. Navy's complicity in child prostitution overseas. He perceived an inconsistency in the AFA objecting to taxpayer funding of a book that exposed and criticized sexual exploitation, when the AFA could have been objecting to taxpayer funding of the exploitation itself.

One of the Guys was subsequently nominated for the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, which recognizes authors who have stood up to censorship in the United States.

In May, 2001 Young published an article in the San Francisco Chronicle that accused novelist Melany Neilson of plagiarizing, in The Persia Cafe, significant portions of verbatim text from the novel The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. Young criticized Neilson's publisher, St. Martin's Press, for refusing to pull copies of The Persia Cafe from stores. Young placed his argument within the context of the concurrent litigation between Alice Randall and the estate of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind. He argued that Randall's book, The Wind Done Gone, was not in fact an instance of plagiarism, because Randall's intent was humorous and parodic, and therefore deserving of First Amendment protection, while Neilson's borrowing from Kingsolver involved verbatim text without parodic intent, thus Neilson's borrowing was not protected. Randall's attorneys cited Young's opinion piece among the evidence in favor of Randall, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated an injunction against publishing the book in Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin .

Young also wrote a much-publicized article in the New York Press about Brad Vice, a short-story writer whose first collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, won the 2005 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press. Vice's collection was later pulled from the shelves and destroyed by his publisher, based on an allegation of plagiarism. Young's article summarized the plagiarism case against Vice while also claiming to discover an additional plagiarism charge against Vice. Young was the first to discover and report that Vice's "Tuscaloosa Knights" story appears not only in the pulped book, but also in Vice's 2001 University of Cincinnati dissertation draft of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Young's article stimulated a great deal of Internet discussion and was cited by a number of blogs and a newspaper in Japan. Several independent bloggers agreed with Young that Vice had committed plagiarism.

Young's essay One Writer’s Big Innings, a comic look at the struggles of a young writer, was reprinted in AWP Chronicle, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and won the Black Warrior Review’s Best of the 1990s Nonfiction Award in 2002.

Young continued to write and publish in the wake of the One of the Guys controversy. He began work on a multi-volume historical novel based on the half-century of conflict between the alcoholic pro-German newspaper publisher Cissy Patterson and her daughter, the Countess Felicia Gizycka, who was one of the founding female members of Alcoholics Anonymous.

One of the Guys HarperCollins, May 1999 (hardcover), September 2000 (trade paperback).

Philip of the Streets (excerpt from Thank You for Keeping Me Sober), Connotation Press (February 2010)

Running Away from Big Guy (excerpt from Thank You for Keeping Me Sober), The Espresso: San Diego’s Coffeehouse & Café Newspaper (December 24, 2009)

The Ecstasy of the Do-It-Yourself Novel (review of the novel Burn & Learn: Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era, by Eric Paul Shaffer), Connotation Press (November 2009)

The Death of the Death of the Novel (literary essay), The Southern Review, Louisiana State University (Winter 2008)

“A Taste of California,” (food article), Senses Magazine (October 2007)

“The Death of the Cool,” (addiction essay), Senses Magazine (September 2007)

“Elk Hunt, Wyoming, 1917,” (historical essay), Owen Wister Review, University of Wyoming (Spring 2006)

A Charming Plagiarist: The Downfall of Brad Vice (literary essay), New York Press (November 30, 2005)

An Experiment in Pleasure (review of the novel A Gesture through Time by Elizabeth Block), The Brooklyn Rail (September 2005)

“The Richest Girl in the World,” (historical essay), Southern Humanities Review, Auburn University (Spring 2005)

“Mimi and Cecilia: A Recollection,” (personal essay), Santa Monica Review, Santa Monica College (Spring 2003)

“On Being Published in the Black Warrior Review,” (literary essay), Black Warrior Review, University of Alabama (Fall 2002)

Scarlett O'Hara, Incorporated (op-ed), San Francisco Chronicle (May 18, 2001)

"Ask, Tell, and Prosecute: Navy and Marine Complicity in Thailand's Child Sex Trade Shouldn't Be Tolerated” (op-ed), The Portland Oregonian (December 26, 2000)

A Strange ‘Family Values’ Attack on the NEA The Washington Post (December 15, 2000)

“Peacock Island” (excerpt from the novel One of the Guys), New Millennium Writings (Spring 1997)

“Empire of Words” (excerpt from the novel One of the Guys), Another Chicago Magazine (Spring 1997)

“The Final Exit of Xavier Jones” (short story), Gulf Coast A Journal of Literature and Fine Art, University of Houston (Spring-Summer 1997)

“Bus from Oaxaca” (personal essay, first prize), New Millennium Writings (Fall 1996)

“The Girl in the White Corvair” (personal essay), West Branch, Bucknell University (Fall 1994)

“Impurity” (personal essay) in Bless Me, Father: Stories of Catholic Childhood anthology, New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Reprinted from Pikestaff Forum (Spring 1994)

“Armentrout” (short story), New Orleans Review, Loyola University New Orleans (Winter 1993)

“Litmag Chain Letter” (literary essay), ZYZZYVA (Summer 1993)

“One Writer’s Big Innings” (literary essay), The Writer's Chronicle, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (December 1992) Reprinted from Black Warrior Review, University of Alabama (Fall 1992)

“Ten Years Later, New World Order Is Not Quite What U.S. Thought”(op-ed), Houston Post (April 17, 1991)

“After an Assassination in the Philippines” (short story), Buffalo Press (January-February 1991)

“Green River” (short story), The Davis Enterprise (December 17, 1987)

“It’s Greek to Me” (celebrity profile), San Diego Magazine (October 1982)