Keith Taylor's interest in science fiction began when he was a child listening to radio serials such as Speed King, Kings of Space and Captain Miracle. As a teenager he was attracted to heroic fantasy in books by the American writers Leigh Brackett and Robert E. Howard. Taylor started writing his own stories at the age of nine.
Taylor joined the army in 1965 and, as a member of the Medical Corps, he was stationed at the Australian Base Hospital in Vung Tau, Vietnam, in 1967. After he left the army in 1970 he began writing more seriously, selling his first 'Bard' stories to Fantastic, an American magazine, under the pseudonym Dennis More. According to the entry for Taylor in The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction (1998), some of Taylor's shorter work has been published in another American publication, Weird Tales; its Fall 1988 edition was a special Keith Taylor edition containing three of his stories: 'The Haunting of Mara', 'Men from the Plain of Lir', and 'The Ordeal Stone'.