Peck was raised in Kansas, and attended Drew University in New Jersey He graduated in 1989. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995. He currently teaches creative writing at The New School in New York City. He is openly gay.

Peck's first novel, Martin and John, was published in 1993. His subsequent work, which continued to explore issues of identity and sexuality, were met with more mixed reviews. Salon.com described Now It's Time to Say Goodbye as a "hyperpotboiler" with a plot "both sensational and preposterous". The New York Review of Books called Martin and John "surprisingly sophisticated", but said Now It's Time to Say Goodbye "collapsed under the weight of its overladen allegorical structures" and diagnosed Peck's fiction as a "seesaw between a strained "'lyricism' ... and cliché".

Peck has also drawn attention as a critic. His reviews for The New Republic, while establishing him as one of the most influential commentators on books, also garnered the opprobrium of the literary establishment for their negative treatment of some of the most highly regarded writers at the time, but also their underlying questioning of what would be the larger project of turn-of-the-century American letters. His most notorious line, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation," set the tone for a collections of essays published under the title Hatchet Jobs.

His critics attacked in turn, with the editors of Brooklyn based n+1 magazine, writing:

"With the emergence of the ridiculous Dale Peck, the method of Wieseltier's literary salon reached its reductio ad absurdum. Peck smeared the walls with shit, and bankrupted their authority for all time to come. So many forms of extremism turn into their opposite at the terminal stage. Thus The New Republic’s supposed brief for dry, austere, high-literary value...manifesting itself for years in a baffled rage against everything new or confusing...led to Peck’s auto-therapeutic wetness (as self-pity is the refuge of bullies) and hatred of classic modernism (which, to philistines, will always be new and confusing)."

Peck's output has been steady and varied; his recent work includes forays into pop culture, film and television criticism, queer theory and children's literature. He is currently a columnist for Out.

Novels and Non-Fiction

• Martin and John (1993) - released as Fucking Martin in the UK
• The Law of Enclosures (1996)
• Now It's Time to Say Goodbye (1999)
• What We Lost (2004)
• Hatchet Jobs (2004)
• The Garden of Lost and Found(2007 publication canceled upon withdrawal by author)
• Body Surfing (2009)
• Shift: A Novel (Gates of Orpheus Trilogy) (2010) with Tim Kring

Children's books

• The First Voyage (2005)
• A Drift House Voyage (2007)
• Sprout (2009)