Peter Lyon, the grandson of muckraking journalist S. S. McClure, was born in Madison, Wisconsin on September 30, 1915 and grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. After attending St. James School near Hagerstown, Maryland, Lyon spent a year at L'Ecole du Montcel, France. Before graduating from Williams College in 1936, he served as its college paper editor and yearbook editor.
Peter Lyon began his writing career in radio. From 1936 to 1939 he worked for Time, Inc. on Architectural Forum and briefly served as Time's senior writer. After leaving Time in 1939, Lyon steadily increased his activities as a free lance writer for such radio series as The Court of Missing Heirs, 1939-1942, Cavalcade of America, 1939-1942, and The Eternal Light, 1948-1951. Scripts he wrote for specials include Bretton Woods, 1945, and The Hollywood Picture, 1948. During World War II Lyon wrote for radio programs of the Office of War Information and the Commission of Inter-American Affairs. In the 1940s he also wrote miscellaneous scripts for the Red Cross, the Cancer Society, U. S. Public Health Service, and the United States Treasury. In 1948 Lyon served his industry as president of the Radio Writer's Guild and negotiated large wage increases for writers of the Columbia Broadcasting System. After the war he began to diversify and contributed scripts to television.
In the mid-1950s Lyon turned his talents to writing books and articles. In 1955 he co-authored Alcoholism, Its Scope, Cause and Treatment, and in 1957 he ghosted several books including Edo McCullough's Good Old Coney Island. His articles were accepted by such magazines as Holiday, Horizon, American Heritage, Redbook, and Saturday Evening Post. His Success Story: The Life and Times of S. S. McClure won the Frank Luther Mott Research Award of Kappa Tau in 1963. In 1968 his study of railroad history, To Hell in a Day Coach: An Exasperated Look at American Railroads, was published, and his 1971 book The Wild, Wild West concerns the myths of the American West.
