Terry Davis wrestled three years at Shadle Park High School in Spokane, Washington and taught and coached wrestling at the high school level in Spokane and for one year at the American School of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

He is best known for his 1979 novel Vision Quest about Louden Swain, a wrestler at Thompson High School who has just turned 18 years old and decides that he needs to something meaningful in his life. Swain decides to embark on a vision quest, a Native American term for a mission. His goal is to drop two weight classes to challenge three-time undefeated state champion Brian Schute.

In his nomination letter for Davis, Matthew Modine, who played Swain in the 1985 movie Vision Quest, wrote that “countless people have told me how Davis’s story saved their lives and inspired them to be and do better. That’s what outstanding people do – they inspire others.”

John Irving, who was honored as an Outstanding American by the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992 and who taught Davis at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, has called Vision Quest "the truest novel about growing up since The Catcher in the Rye."

The movie sponsored a USA Wrestling poster featuring the 1984 Olympians, which included Hall of Fame Distinguished Members Ed Banach, Lou Banach, Bruce Baumgartner, Jeff Blatnick, Dan Chandler, Barry Davis, Steve Fraser, Greg Gibson, Joe Gonzales, Randy Lewis, Andy Rein, Dave Schultz, Mark Schultz, and Bobby Weaver.

Vision Quest was nominated for an American Book Award in 1981 and was named one of the Best of the Best Young Adult novels by Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of National Council of Teachers of English. It received a Best Books for Young Adults award from the American Library Association in 1995.

His other novels are Mysterious Ways in 1984 and If Rock and Roll Were A Machine in 1993, which received Best Books for Young Adults awards from the ALA and the Association for Library Service to Children and a Books for the Teen Age award from the New York Public Library.

Davis had two non-fiction articles published in Sports Illustrated, What Does a Wrestler Do For His Nosebleeds in 1978 and A Swimmer of Dire Straits in 1975, and three short fiction works - As I Did It in 1974 and As I Saw It and Fond Links to the Sausage Man in 1975.

Davis received the Governor's Award for the Arts from the State of Washington in 1980 and the Distinguished Alumni Award from Eastern Washington University in 1984. Davis received his bachelor's degree in education from Eastern Washington State College in 1969 and his master's degree from the University of Iowa in 1973. He continued his education at Stanford University as an honored Wallace Stegner Literary Fellow.

He taught creative writing for more than 30 years at East Carolina University, the University Idaho, Eastern Washington University, Gonzaga University, and Minnesota State University.