Trocchi was born in Glasgow to a Scottish mother and Italian father. After working as a seaman on the Murmansk convoys, he attended the University of Glasgow. On graduation he obtained a travelling grant that enabled him to relocate to continental Europe. In the early 1950s he lived in Paris and edited the literary magazine "Merlin", which published Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Logue, and Pablo Neruda, amongst others. Although not published in "Merlin", American writer Terry Southern, who lived in Paris from 1948–1952, became a close friend of both Trocchi and his colleague Richard Seaver, and the three later co-edited the anthology "Writers In Revolt" (1962). Though "Merlin" had been established somewhat in rivalry with the "Paris Review", George Plimpton also had served on the magazine's editorial board. Trocchi claimed that this journal came to an end when the US State Department cancelled its many subscriptions in protest over an article by Jean-Paul Sartre praising the homoeroticism of Jean Genet.