Born on November 27, 1874 in Xenia, Ohio, Torrence was the eldest child of Captain David Findley Torrence and Mary Ridgely Torrence. His father was a lumber dealer. His grandfather, John Torrence, founded Xenia and Lexington, Kentucky. He had a brother, Findley McDowell Torrence, who attended Harvard University and married a hometown woman, Patricia Broadstone. He had tutors while he was growing up and attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio from 1893 to 1895 and transferred to Princeton University. He withdrew from Princeton after he suffered an illness that prevented him from returning to school in 1896.
During his early year in New York, he became part of a circle of poets that included E. A. Robinson, William Vaughn Moody, and Robert Frost. In 1900, he published The House of a Hundred Lights, which Edmund Clarence Stedman helped him revise. The verse plays, showing the influence of John Millington Synge, showed realistic portrayals of African Americans, and a revolt against their station in society. While his verse dramas were published as books, they were not produced as plays. In 1914, his one-act playGranny Maumee, which was first performed by a white case, helped create opportunities for black actors in theaters in America when it was produced with black actors in 1917. It was "one of the first opportunities for serious black actors". Torrence's collection of plays, Three Plays for a Negro Theater premiered in 1917, as a production of the Negro Players. He work was noteworthy in its blending of compassion and strength. Torrence had fellowships to MacDowell Colony, the artist colony, in 1914, 1917, and then every year from 1942 to 1950. In 1938, he was poet in residence at Antioch College and in 1941 to 1942, he was Fellow in Creative Writing at Miami University. He was poetry editor of The New Republic, mentoring Louise Bogan. He organized the National Survey of the Negro Theater, for the Rockefeller Foundation. The posthumous bookPoems, of Torrence's selected poetry, was published in 1952. He chose works that reflected his values, compassion for others, sense of injustice among people, and a faith in mankind.
In 1914, he married author Olivia Howard Dunbar, who was a magazine writer, novelist, and reporter for the New York World. They lived at Washington Square in Lower Manhattan. Torrence died on December 25, 1950 in New York City. His papers are held at Princeton. Olivia died on January 6, 1953.
