Donald Moffitt was born on July 20, 1931 in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Chelsea High School in 1947 and in 1948 began commuting from his parents' home in Waltham, Massachusetts to Brandeis University as a member of its small first class. He attended only the first two years before moving to New York City to work.

Shortly after arriving in New York, Moffitt met singer Ann Tierney, whom he married in 1954. Moffitt worked for trade magazines, including National Jeweler, and as a public relations executive at Rumrill-Hoyt in Rochester. He and Ann moved to Monroe, Maine in the 1980s, where Moffitt began to focus more intently on his science fiction writing career. He devoted the remainder of his time to exploring his interest in Maine marine history by working as a docent at the Penobscot Marine Museum. Moffitt died on December 10, 2014 in Monroe, Maine.

Moffitt showed an early interest in writing, particularly in the mystery, science fiction, and fantasy genres, and began submitting short stories to a variety of publications in the late 1940s. His first stories were published in pulp magazines under a variety of pseudonyms in the early 1950s, and his first pulp novels, Convention Girl (1959) written as Donald M. Wright and Passion Slave (1960) written as Wilson MacDonald, followed soon after.

In the later 1960s and early 1970s, Moffitt began publishing stories in well-established digest magazines, including Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. The mid-1970s also saw the rapid publication of an eight-part series of espionage novels called The Baroness, written as Paul Kenyon.

In 1977, Moffitt published his first stand-alone novel under his own name, The Jupiter Theft. This novel marked Moffitt's ultimate move away from pulp fiction into the scientifically accurate science fiction, known as hard science fiction.

Moffitt published several novels in the 1980s and 1990s, including his historical fiction works, Inheritors of the Storm (1981), written as Victor Sondheim, and The Dreamers (1992) and The Voyager (1994), both written as Paul King, Moffitt's final pseudonym. Moffitt published two hard science fiction series--The Genesis Quest and The Mechanical Sky--under his own name between 1986 and 1990. Moffitt's last novel published during his lifetime was Jovian (2003). Moffitt continued writing both short stories and novels until his death, and his novel Children of the Comet, as well as two short stories, "The Color of Gold" and "A Handful of Clay," were published posthumously in 2015.

[Information retrieved from materials in collection and Donald Moffitt's website, http://www.donaldmoffitt.com/donaldmoffitt.com.html.]