Graham is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993) and ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), now the standard college text. He has worked as a consultant to the US Department of Energy, DuPont, and Interleaf. He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.
He is also the author of the essay Why Nerds are Unpopular, and A Plan for Spam, which helped popularize naive Bayesian classification as a spam filter.