Andrews was born on April 2, 1938, in
Denver, which he later portrayed in
The Times as "the sort of city many Americans would like their home-town to be", although he regarded it as having a mediocre cultural life. He studied English at
Brandeis University – where he was taught by Lowell,
Philip Rahv,
Claude Vigée and
Pierre Emmanuel – and graduated with a
BA in 1960. He then embarked on postgraduate work at the
University of California, Berkeley, where he received a
Fulbright grant to conduct research overseas at
King's College London. In 1964 Andrews took up a post as Assistant Lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea (now
Swansea University). During that time he wrote several reviews and articles for leading publications, and from 1969 to 1978 he was the poetry critic for
The Sunday Times. That same year, he was a defence witness for
John Calder and
Marion Boyars (his publishers) during the trial brought against them by the Crown for the publication of
Last Exit to Brooklyn by
Hubert Selby. It was at the celebratory party afterwards that he first met Burroughs – initially mistaking him for a waiter, as the latter was dressed in dark suit and tie. He had four volumes of poetry published during his lifetime, beginning with
Ash Flowers in 1958 (completed whilst still an undergraduate), and followed by
Fugitive Visions (1962),
The Death of Mayakovsky (1968) and
Kaleidoscope (1973). His manuscript of
Kaleidoscope is at
Indiana University, where he was a Visiting Professor from 1978 to 1979. Andrews lived his final years as a recluse in
Nottingham, and died there on February 13, 2009. He left a major work, "Hometown (The Denver Poem)", 57 parts long. He worked on this
magnum opus for over thirty years, completing it in 2007. This work was finally published posthumously by
Alma Books in October 2025, in a volume of the complete works of Lyman Andrews called
Hometown and Other Poems. ==Awards==