Edwin Palmer Hoyt (1923-2005) was born in Portland, Oregon and attended the University of Oregon. He served with the Office of War Information during World War II and in 1945/6 he was a foreign correspondent for The Denver Post and the United Press, reporting from locations in China, Thailand, Burma, India, the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Korea.
Hoyt subsequently worked as an ABC broadcaster, covering the 1948 revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was then editor of the editorial page at The Denver Post and later editor and publisher of the Colorado Springs Free Press, an associate editor of Collier's Weekly in New York, a television producer and writer-director at CBS and an assistant publisher of American Heritage magazine in New York.
He became a full-time writer in 1958 and over 40 years produced nearly 200 books. While Hoyt wrote about 20 novels, the vast majority of his works are biographies and other forms of non-fiction, with a heavy emphasis on military history, particularly World War II. Among his novels is a series of three novels about American naval hero Stephen Decatur set during the war against the Barbary Pirates.