Steven Pressfield was born on September 1, 1943, in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to a Navy father and mother. He graduated from Duke University in 1965 and shortly afterward, in January of 1966, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, serving until 1971. This military experience has profoundly influenced his writing and life philosophy.

Pressfield's literary career is marked by a significant milestone with the publication of The Legend of Bagger Vance in 1995, which established him as a writer of books. However, it wasn't an easy path. It took him seventeen years of various jobs, including working as an advertising copywriter, schoolteacher, tractor-trailer driver, bartender, oilfield roustabout, and attendant in a mental hospital, among others, to earn his first paycheck as a writer.

His works, particularly Gates of Fire, have found a unique place among U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, circulating throughout platoons and leading to its inclusion on the Commandant of the Marine Corps' Reading List. It is also taught at West Point and Annapolis and at the Marine Corps Basic School at Quantico. Tides of War is on the curriculum of the Naval War College.

Pressfield’s writing philosophy embodies a warrior code, but it's internal, aimed at battling self-sabotage, which he labels as "Resistance" in his 2002 nonfiction book, The War of Art. He believes in the Muse and in previous lives, holding a vision that books and music exist before they are written, propelled into being by something beyond the material world.

He has also been vocal about his struggles to establish himself as a writer, detailed in The War of Art, where he describes the artist's role as a combination of reverence for the unknowable nature of creativity and a pragmatic approach to the discipline of writing.