Wayne Andrews was born on September 5, 1913, in Kenilworth, Illinois. As a teenager he attended the Lawrenceville School, a preparatory boarding school near Princeton, New Jersey. Andrews’ early interests included the French language and culture, and through frequent travels to Paris he made the acquaintance of several leaders of the burgeoning Surrealist movement. In 1930, at the age of seventeen, Andrews and Lawrenceville classmate James Douglas Peck co-founded a mimeographed journal of French culture (written in French) called . The journal went through several iterations and titles (, , and ) while maintaining an essentially similar format and nearly identical content and themes. Andrews and Peck sent copies of the periodical to the writers, artists, and critics who inspired them, to a mixed but largely positive reception.

Andrews graduated from Harvard College in 1936 and subsequently worked as a banker and then as Curator of Manuscripts for the New York Historical Society. In 1956 he earned a PhD in art history from Columbia University. During his time at Harvard and Columbia Andrews wrote Surrealist prose which was later collected in two volumes, (1936) and (1948), both published under the pseudonym Montagu O’Reilly. Upon graduation from Columbia Andrews began work as an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, and in 1963 wrote a biography entitled .

In 1964 Andrews accepted a position created expressly for him as the Archives of American Art Professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. In this portion of his life Andrews became known as a prolific architectural historian and photographer, and wrote extensively on the topic. In earlier works such as (1955, revised ed. 1978) and (1960, revised ed. 1979) Andrews provided introductions to national architecture, while later publications centered around regional United States architecture.

Andrews’ interest in European culture remained active during this period with his continued publication of social and cultural histories and biographies, such as (1972) and (1981). Andrews’ final book, , presents a “cunningly brief and amusingly opinionated personal history of Surrealism,” (Richard Burgin, , 1990), the bulk of which is focused around Andrews’ acquaintance and friend, Surrealist leader André Breton. Andrews died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-three on August 17, 1987, while travelling in Paris. He lived permanently with his wife Elizabeth and daughter Elizabeth (Lisa) Waties in Chicago and had nearly completed his work on . Though the manuscript was only “nine tenths” finished, according to publisher James Laughlin, was published by New Directions in 1988.