Pierce was born in Atlanta, Georgia and graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1951. He worked at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory before attending graduate school, first at Caltech and then the University of Colorado, at Boulder, where he earned his Ph.D in 1962. He soon lost interest in physics and joined various white separatist groups, forming his own group, the National Alliance, in 1974. He also adopted the religion of Cosmotheism at about the same time.
Pierce came to public attention following the Oklahoma City bombing. The perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, had apparently been influenced by The Turner Diaries (1978), a novel written by Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. The book is a graphically violent depiction of a future race war in the United States as told through the perspective of Earl Turner, an active member of the white separatist revolutionary underground. The book opens with the bombing of FBI headquarters, which appeared strikingly similar to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Although The Turner Diaries was originally only available by mail order and at special events (such as gun shows), it is believed to have sold half a million copies, and to have had many more readers, because it was handed from one person to another.
The Turner Diaries is also believed to have been the inspiration behind a small group of militant white supremacists in the early 1980s who called themselves the Brüder Schweigen or sometimes simply The Order. The Order was connected to numerous crimes, including counterfeiting and bank robbery. The Order's leader, Robert Jay Matthews, died in a shoot out with police and federal agents on Whidbey Island in Washington. Other Order members, most notably David Lane, were captured and sent to federal prisons, where they continued to voice their support for white supremacy.
Other titles by Pierce include Hunter (1984), which reads more like a survival manual for individual militants than a blueprint for revolution, and New World Order Comix # 1:The Saga of White Will!! (1993), which is openly directed at white youth.
Pierce spent his final years in relative seclusion in West Virginia, where he hosted his own weekly radio show, American Dissident Voices, and oversaw his publishing and record companies devoted to the promotion of his White separatist political ideology and Cosmotheist spirituality.
