Robert Trumbull was born in Chicago in 1912 and graduated from the University of Washington at Seattle. He worked as a reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser from 1933 to 1943 but began writing for the New York Times in 1941, serving during World War II as the Times war correspondent in the Pacific theater until 1945. The US Navy awarded him the Asiatic-Pacific Theater Ribbon for his wartime reports. After the war he continued writing for the Times, serving as a foreign correspondent, chief correspondent, and bureau chief in such places as Japan, the Philippines, South and Southeast Asia, Tokyo, China, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands, and Canada. As well as contributing articles on Asian and Pacific affairs to Encyclopedia Americana, Reader s Digest, Saturday Review, and New York Times Magazine, he was the author of ten nonfiction books. For his The Scrutable East: A Correspondent s Report on Southeast Asia, he won the Overseas Press Club s Cornelius Ryan Award in 1964, an award given yearly for best nonfiction book on international affairs.