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Hal Lindsey, born in Houston, Texas in 1929, served in the United States Coast Guard and afterward worked for a period as a Mississippi River tugboat captain before his life took a different direction. He converted to evangelical Christianity, then pursued formal theological training, earning a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary in 1962, a credential that moved him from secular work on the river into a formal grounding in dispensational evangelical theology.
After completing his degree, Lindsey worked with Campus Crusade for Christ into the late 1960s, gaining experience communicating evangelical theology to a wide audience before he turned to writing on his own. That experience speaking to broad audiences through Campus Crusade positioned him to write for general readers rather than only for a theologically trained one when he came to compose his own book.
The path from a Coast Guard enlistment and a tugboat captain's wheel, through conversion and a seminary degree, to a writing career addressed at a mass audience gave Lindsey a biography unusual among evangelical prophecy writers of his generation, most of whom came to the subject through pulpit or academic careers rather than through secular work on the water first, a background that would shape the plain, topical style of the book he went on to write.