Howard O'Hagan was born in Lethbridge, Alberta. As a young man, he worked on survey parties in the Rockies before moving to Montreal to study law at McGill University. After practising law for a brief time, he returned to western Canada to work as a tour guide in Banff National Park. One of the first western Canadians to make a major contribution to Canadian literature, O'Hagan found occasional work in the fifties as a journalist in Victoria, British Columbia, and as a labourer on the waterfront and on survey crews.