L. Ron Hubbard's remarkably versatile career as an internationally best-selling writer spanned more than half a century of literary achievement and wide-ranging influence. In scope and productivity, it ultimately encompassed more than 530 works—over sixty-three million words—of published fiction and nonfiction. Esteemed as a writer's writer, with an unstinting personal dedication to helping other writers, especially beginners, become more proficient and successful at their craft, he also carved out significant careers in other professional fields—as an explorer, mariner and aviator, filmmaker and photographer, philosopher and educator, and musician and composer.

He grew up in the ruggedly open terrain of a still-frontier Montana, was riding horses by the time he was three, and by the age of six had been initiated as a blood brother of a Blackfoot Indian medicine man. While still a teenager, before the advent of modern commercial air transportation, he journeyed more than a quarter of a million miles by sea and land into areas of the Far East then rarely visited by Westerners, broadening his knowledge of other peoples and cultures.