Vollmann studied at Deep Springs College, then earned a B.A., summa cum laude, in comparative literature at Cornell University.
In his youth, Vollmann's younger sister drowned while under his supervision, a tragedy for which he felt responsible. This experience, according to him, influences much of his work.
After graduation, Vollmann went on to the University of California, Berkeley, on a fellowship for a doctoral program in Comparative Literature. He dropped out after one year with the intention of engaging in life instead of just studying. He worked odd jobs, including as a secretary at an insurance company, and saved up enough money to go to Afghanistan in 1982. His experiences traveling with the mujahideen formed the basis of his first non-fiction book An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World which was not published until 1992. Upon his return to the USA he worked as a computer programmer, despite having virtually no experience with computers. According to a New York Times Magazine profile by novelist Madison Smartt Bell, he spent the better part of a year there writing his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, after hours on office computers, subsisting on candy bars from vending machines and hiding from the janitorial staff.
He has written for Harper's, Playboy, Conjunctions, Spin Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, Gear, Granta, and sometimes contributes to The New York Times Book Review among other publications. Vollmann has called himself a "hack journalist" and his travel writing and reportage are often done during research for his fiction or non-fiction projects, giving it a hybridized and journalistic feel.
In early 2004 (after many delays) McSweeney's published Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,300-page, heavily illustrated, seven-volume treatise on violence which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A single-volume condensed version was published at the end of the year by Ecco Press, an abridgment he justified by saying, "I did it for the money." Rising Up and Rising Down represents over 20 years of work and attempts to establish a moral calculus to consider the causes, effects, and ethics of violence. Much of it consists of Vollmann's own reporting from places wracked by violence, among them Cambodia, Somalia, and Iraq.
Vollmann's other works often deal with the settlement of North America (as in A Book of North American Landscapes, a cycle of seven novels), or stories of people (often prostitutes) on the margins of war, poverty, and hope. His 2005 novel Europe Central follows the trajectories of a wide range of characters (including Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich) caught up in the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union, and won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction.
In 2008, he was awarded a five-year fellowship/grant from the Strauss Living Award, that gives writers of note $50,000 a year, tax free.
Many of his books are years in the making: nearly 20 years for Rising Up and Rising Down, five for The Royal Family, and 10 for Imperial.
He has completed a critical study of Japanese Noh Theater, entitled Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater which was published in 2010. He is currently writing a collection of erotic love stories (one of which, "Widow’s Weeds", was published in AGNI #66 in 2007) and the fourth and fifth volumes of the Seven Dreams series. In interviews, he has mentioned a book about abortion called The Shame of Our Youth as well as a study on rape cases in court.
Vollmann's papers were acquired by the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of Ohio State University.
Full-length critical essays have been published in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, BookForum, Open Letters Monthly, and Science Fiction Studies.
Michael Hemmingson co-edited, with Larry McCaffery, Expelled from Eden: A WTV Reader (NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004) and published William T. Vollmann: A Critical Study and Seven Interviews (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co) in 2009.
