Allison Burnett was born on December 16, 1958, in Ithaca, New York, where his father, also named Allison, was working toward his Ph.D. in marine biology at Cornell University. For the next ten years, his family relocated often, as his father moved up the professorial ranks and his mother pursued her Ph.D. in clinical psychology. They ventured abroad for sabbatical leaves to Brussels, Belgium and, later, Naples, Italy. Eventually, his father was hired at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where Allison attended high school and college.

At Northwestern, Allison acted in plays while majoring in the Oral Interpretation of Literature. After winning the annual playwriting contest, he graduated early and moved to New York City. The following year, Allison was accepted as a fellow of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School.  

For the next decade, Allison worked the graveyard shift as a proofreader at a giant corporate law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He also tutored high school students in English. All the while, Allison wrote tirelessly, but, as he was without an agent, his work went almost entirely unread.  At the end of the 1980s, weary of poverty and struggle, he moved to Los Angeles to write screenplays.

Within a year of arriving there, Allison was making a living as a studio screenwriter. Within a few more years, he was making a wonderful living. But a living is not a life.That's when Allison returned to his roots and began to write fiction again.  

In the three decades since, Allison has published eight novels and received screen credit on over a dozen feature films, including Autumn in New York, starring Richard Gere and Winona Ryder, and My Oxford Year, starring Sophia Carson. He also adapted two of his novels into feature films which he directed himself—Ask Me Anything, starring Britt Robertson and Christian Slater, and Another Girl, starring Sammi Hanratty.

Today, Allison lives in Los Angeles with his partner Jessica Pappas, a memoirist and screenwriter. He is the proud father of two sons, Keats and Winslow. Apart from his writing, Allison is an avid collector of historical ephemera.