Ray Hogan was born in Willow Springs, Missouri but moved to New Mexico with his parents at the age of 5. Before he began his writing career, Hogan worked as a truck salesman, a bookkeeper and a tire store manager. Hogan took a correspondence journalism course as well as some english courses and began to write short stories for magazines in the U.S. as well as Germany and Czechoslovakia. He finally got his break into writing as a regular contributor to sports journals such as Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, Hunting and Fishing, and others. Hogan's first novel, Ex-Marshall, was published in 1956. In his thirty years as an author, Hogan has written 142 novels, 200 articles and 25 short stories.