Pulvers was born into a Jewish-American family and studied political science, Polish and Russian at the universities of California, Harvard, and Warsaw. He gained a Master of Arts in Russian Studies from Harvard. Pulvers left the United States in protest against the Vietnam War. After extensive travel in the Soviet Union and postgraduate study in Warsaw and Paris Pulvers taught Russian and Polish at Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan 1967-1971. He then moved to Australia in 1972 to teach Japanese language and literature at the Australian National University. He continued writing and translating; his first plays were performed, chiefly by the Australian Theatre Workshop, Canberra; La Mama and Hoopla, Melbourne. In 1976 Pulvers became an Australian citizen and in 1979 a director and writer-in-residence at Hoopla in Melbourne, now the Playbox Theatre Company. He returned to Japan in 1982 to write and direct.
Pulvers, who has Australian citizenship, has travelled frequently between Australia and Japan, and has lived in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. He has directed major plays at the Adelaide Arts Festival (1982, 2000) and in theatres in Melbourne, Canberra and Tokyo including his own translations of August Strindberg's The Dance of Death and Miss Julia. Pulvers has also written scripts for film and radio as well as lyrics for songs by Michael Nyman. In 1983 he was assistant director of the film, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. He translated The Red Demons (2003) by Noda Hidekii which was performed by the Young Vic Theatre Company in 2003. Pulvers is Japan's most published foreign author with twenty-six books in Japanese and English by 2004 including novels, short stories, plays, essays, translations and an autobiography. Pulvers has been a professor at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. In 2004-2005 he was cultural advisor to the Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi. In 2006 his play, Tomoko's Story, was performed at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney and the Hartley Playhouse in Adelaide by the original Tokyo cast in its original language. It was the first drama written by an Australian in Japanese.
