John Hyatt Downing was born on March 18, 1888 in Granville, Iowa. His family first moved to Hawarden, Iowa before settling in Blunt, South Dakota. Downing worked on his father's ranch and then left to work with railroad surveyors in the West. Returning to attend the University of South Dakota, Downing graduated in 1913. After graduation he held a number of jobs including newspaper reporting and fiction writing in Sioux city. He also worked for the Internal Revenue Service in South Dakota. During this period he met and married Mary McGinnis. They had one son, John, born in 1921. The family next moved to New Mexico because Downing had contracted tuberculosis. By 1925, he had recovered and they returned to the Midwest.

He worked as an insurance agent in Saint Paul, Minnesota, while writing short stories as a sideline. From 1925 to 1930 he published a number of stories in Scribner's Magazine which were well received by the critics. However, after a promotion from the insurance company, Downing stopped writing. After a seven-year layoff, he quit his job, returned to Sioux City, and dedicated himself to a writing career. His first novel was published in 1938, closely followed by four more. After his best seller, Sioux City, sold to the movies, the Downing's once again moved, this time to Los Angeles. Although the book was never filmed, Downing found work at Twentieth Century Fox writing publicity and radio scripts. He continued to write and publish, although with less and less success. His last published story appeared in Reader's Digest in 1963. J. Hyatt Downing died ten years later, at the age of eigthy-five.