orn and raised in Mapleton, Iowa, Arthur Hawthorne Carhart (1892 -- 1978), was first published at age eleven. His essay on "The Downey Woodpecker" appeared in the children's corner of the Women's Home Companion. Carhart graduated from Iowa State University in 1916. He received the first degree in landscape architecture and city planning conferred by the university in Ames, Iowa.

He worked for a Chicago firm of landscape architects until enlisting in the Army in 1917. There he served as a bacteriologist and public health officer in the Sanitary Corps at Camp Mead, Maryland. After the war, Carhart moved to Colorado where he joined the U.S. Forest Service as a recreation engineer. In 1923, he became part of McCrary, Culley, and Carhart. It was a landscape architecture and city planning firm that worked out of Denver.

Arthur Carhart had his first book published in 1928. By 1931, he had sold out to his partners and had become a full time freelance writer. For the next eight years he wrote and sold novels, short stories, and articles of all description. He put his writings on hold to take a position as the Colorado coordinator of the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration program. He then became the Regional Information Executive of the Rocky Mountain Region for the U.S. Office of Price Administration. Returning to his writing in 1946, he published The Outdoorsman's Cookbook. Carhart published some twenty-four books and over 4,000 articles during his career. They ranged from Western novels to books on sport and conservation.