Leigh Brackett was born in in Los Angeles, California and raised near Santa Monica. She spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy, playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard. She began writing fantastic adventures of her own, and her first published science fiction story was "Martian Quest", which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Her first novel, No Good from a Corpse (1944), was a hard-boiled mystery novel. This novel inspired Hollywood director Howard Hawks to ask her to help William Faulkner write the script for the film The Big Sleep (1946). In 1946 she married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton, and after the release of The Big Sleep, returned to writing science-fiction writing, producing several novel-length science fiction works in addition to short stories. In 1955, as pulp magazines were folding and the market for short science fiction adventure stories was cooling, she began to work more for the film and television markets, although she still produced some science fiction, such as The Long Tomorrow (1955). She returned to fiction writing in the 1970s, producing The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of Skaith (1974), and The Reavers of Skaith (1976), collected as The Book of Skaith in 1976.