Larry Coryell was born Lorenz Albert Van DeLinder III on April 2, 1943, in Galveston, Texas. He never knew his biological father, a musician, and was raised by his mother, Cora, and his stepfather, Gene, a chemical engineer whose surname he took. His mother had him start piano at four. In his teens he switched to guitar, and after the family moved to Richland, Washington, a teacher there lent him records by Les Paul, Johnny Smith, Barney Kessel, and Tal Farlow. Hearing Wes Montgomery, he said, changed his life. He graduated from Richland High School, played in local bands including the Jailers, the Rumblers, the Royals, and the Flames, and then enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle.

In September 1965 he moved to New York City and studied at the Mannes School of Music. He replaced Gábor Szabó in Chico Hamilton's quintet and appears on the Hamilton album The Dealer, recorded in September 1966, which includes his composition "Larry of Arabia." He also became a regular at the Manhattan club the Scene, where he heard Jimi Hendrix in 1967 and caught Frank Zappa, Buddy Guy, and the Velvet Underground. In 1966 he helped steer a group of New York neighbors toward rock, the Free Spirits, with saxophonist Jim Pepper and drummer Bob Moses. Their only album, Out of Sight and Sound, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder with Bob Thiele producing and issued by ABC in 1967, is cited as one of the first records to blend jazz and rock. Coryell left the group in 1967 to join vibraphonist Gary Burton, whose quartet with bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Roy Haynes made Duster (1967), followed by Lofty Fake Anagram (1967), A Genuine Tong Funeral (1968), and a live album, Gary Burton Quartet in Concert (1968). In 1969 Tony Williams invited him to join his new band, Lifetime; Coryell declined and recommended a British newcomer to New York, John McLaughlin, whose tenure with Lifetime led to his work with Miles Davis.

At Vanguard Coryell made Lady Coryell (recorded in 1968 and released in 1969) and Coryell (1969), and then Spaces, recorded in March 1969 and released in 1970, with McLaughlin on second guitar, Chick Corea on electric piano, bassist Miroslav Vitouš, and drummer Billy Cobham. It was not a hit at first, but after Vanguard reissued it a few years later it sold about 250,000 copies, and its players went on to the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report. In these years he also played on Herbie Mann's Memphis Underground (1969) and made Barefoot Boy (1971), the live Fairyland (1971), and Larry Coryell at the Village Gate (1971). Barefoot Boy, Offering (1972), and The Real Great Escape (1973) were made with his childhood friend, the keyboardist Mike Mandel, in a band called Foreplay, though the records carried only Coryell's name.

After the success of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Coryell formed the Eleventh House with drummer Alphonse Mouzon, Mandel, and bassist Danny Trifan, with Randy Brecker on trumpet for the debut and Mike Lawrence in the trumpet chair on later recordings from 1974. That debut, Introducing the Eleventh House with Larry Coryell (Vanguard, 1974), reached No. 163 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for 11 weeks, though he later called it a "search party" for a band still finding its identity. John Lee replaced Trifan on bass for Level One (Arista, 1975) and Aspects (Arista, 1976). In 1975 he traded solos with Al Di Meola on "Prince of the Sea," the closing track of Lenny White's debut Venusian Summer. When fusion cooled, he turned to acoustic guitar and to duets: Two for the Road (1977) with Steve Khan, and Twin House (1977) and Splendid (1978) with the Belgian guitarist Philip Catherine, who showed him Django Reinhardt's "Nuages" in 1976. He appeared on three albums by Charles Mingus, Three or Four Shades of Blues (1977), Me Myself an Eye (1979), and Something Like a Bird (1980), recorded Young Django (1979) with Stéphane Grappelli and Catherine, and wrote a monthly column for Guitar Player from 1977 to 1989. In 1978 he began sketching pieces with Davis, who was recovering from hip surgery in Connecticut, and the next year he formed the Guitar Trio with McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía; the group toured Europe briefly and is documented on the video Meeting of the Spirits, filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Alcohol and drug addiction cost him his place in the trio in the early 1980s. He overcame his alcohol and heroin dependence in 1981 and began practicing Nichiren Buddhism. His comeback was a set of solo guitar transcriptions of three Stravinsky ballets: L'Oiseau de feu and Petrouchka and then Le Sacre du printemps (Philips, 1983), which he recorded on March 21, 1983, with Teo Macero producing after three months of preparation. In 1984 he recorded Vivaldi's The Four Seasons as a duo with the classical guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita, and in 1985 he made Together (Concord Jazz) with Emily Remler, a direct-to-two-track guitar duet record that Leonard Feather called the best guitar duo album of the year. In 1988 he formed the trio Guitarjam with Laurindo Almeida and Sharon Isbin, which played Carnegie Hall, and in 1989 he joined Di Meola and Biréli Lagrène as the Super Guitar Trio, filmed at Montreux.

From the 1990s he recorded steadily for CTI, Shanachie, HighNote, Chesky, and, in his last years, Wide Hive Records. Spaces Revisited (Shanachie, 1997) reunited him with Cobham and added Biréli Lagrène and bassist Richard Bona; Monk, Trane, Miles & Me (HighNote, 1999) was a straight-ahead tribute; Three Guitars (Chesky, 2003) paired him with Badi Assad and John Abercrombie; and Impressions: The New York Sessions (Chesky, 2008) was an organ-trio session featuring Sam Yahel. His memoir, Improvising: My Life in Music, appeared in 2007. From 2008 he toured in a duo with the guitarist Roman Miroshnichenko, and from 2010 with a trio including the pianist John Colianni. The Eleventh House regrouped in 2012 and recorded Seven Secrets (Savoy Jazz). Coryell passed away in a New York City hotel room on February 19, 2017, at 73, after two nights at the Iridium jazz club in Manhattan. He lived in Orlando, Florida, and was survived by his wife Tracey Piergross and by his sons, the guitarists Murali and Julian Coryell. His opera based on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was completed by Miroshnichenko and the Serbian guitarist Nenad Stephanovich and had its world premiere at the 2017 World of Guitar festival, dedicated to him.

Coryell is widely called the godfather of fusion, a phrase Al Di Meola used for him, and with Gábor Szabó he was among the first guitarists to meld jazz with country and rock. His sound grew from Wes Montgomery, Barney Kessel, and Tal Farlow on one side and Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix on the other, and when he first heard Ravi Shankar's records in 1962 he recognized the blues in the bent strings. The result was a loud, sustained, blues-bent electric tone laid over jazz harmony, heard on Spaces and with Gary Burton's quartet, and the Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide called him one of the most creative and accomplished modern electric guitarists. Di Meola said Coryell's approach gave him the confidence to follow his own direction. Coryell was candid about the genre's excesses: in the mid-1970s, he said, guitar playing had become too fast and too competitive, and he moved to acoustic duets, classical transcriptions, and standards. That range, from Stravinsky and Vivaldi to Monk and Coltrane, was his answer to the label. He was also a teacher and wrote a monthly column for Guitar Player from 1977 to 1989, and John McLaughlin took the Lifetime seat he turned down. Critics were mixed on his electric 1970s bands, which some heard as unfocused next to the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and warmer toward his duo records with Remler and Catherine and his late acoustic work.