Peter Boerner was born on March 10, 1926, in Tartu (formerly Dorpat), Estonia. In 1946, he began studying German and comparative literature, art history, and anthropology at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He became interested in Goethe at an early age – first through the seminars of Ernst Beutler and later by working on projects for the Freies Deutsches Hochstift.

As a student at the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, he compiled four registers for the Goethe Memorial Edition, which was published by Artemis Verlag in Zurich. Beutler emphasized: “Your register is the commentary. [...] Boerner is more than Goethe.”

In 1951, he took over the publication of the Goethe calendar Mit Goethe durch das Jahr, which is still published today. Peter Boerner had a great sense of humor and jokingly referred to himself as Goethe's “calendar man.” After completing his PhD, Boerner became the first curator of the Goethe Museum in Düsseldorf, which was founded in 1955.

“He wants to go to America because Germany is too small for him,” Ernst Beutler reported in a letter of recommendation, and that is indeed what happened: initially in the form of research stays and temporary lectureships. In 1971, he finally took up a professorship in Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Peter Boerner was strongly committed to promoting and popularizing Goethe's work. Clear evidence of this is his comprehensive and affordable 45-volume complete edition of Goethe's works for students, which was published between 1961 and 1963. He also published the Kleine Artemis Goethe, a ten-volume condensed edition of his teacher Beutler's complete works.
In 1964, his biography of Goethe was published as the 100th volume of the famous “Rowohlts Monographien”, bringing Goethe’s life and work to a larger audience. The first edition reached 264,000 print runs, and the new edition (No. 577) was published in 1999 in twelve editions with 56,000 number of copies. The monograph has been translated into eight languages, including Japanese, (South) Korean, Turkish, Danish, Chinese, and Estonian. The English translation was written by his wife, Nancy Boerner, née Sanden, a specialist librarian and translator.