Edwin Palmer Hoyt was born on August 5, 1923 in Portland, Oregon, to Edwin Palmer Hoyt (1897—1979) and his wife, the former Cecile DeVore (1901—1970). A younger brother, Charles Richard, was born in 1928. Hoyt attended the University of Oregon from 1940 to 1943.

In 1943, Hoyt's father, then the editor and publisher of The Oregonian, was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as the director of the Domestic Branch, Office of War Information. The younger Hoyt served with the Office of War Information during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. In 1945 and 1946, he served as a foreign correspondent for The Denver Post (of which his father became editor and publisher in 1946) and the United Press, reporting from locations in China, Thailand, Burma, India, the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Korea.

Hoyt subsequently worked as an ABC broadcaster, covering the 1948 revolution in Czecheslovakia and the Arab-Israeli conflict. From 1949 to 1951 he was the editor of the editorial page at The Denver Post. Hoyt was the editor and publisher of the Colorado Springs Free Press from 1951—1955, and an associate editor of Collier's Weekly in New York from 1955—1956. In 1957 he was a television producer and writer-director at CBS, and in 1958 he was an assistant publisher of American Heritage magazine in New York.

From 1958 Hoyt has been a full-time writer. In the nearly 50 years since his first publication in 1960, he has produced nearly 200 books. While Hoyt has written about 20 novels, the vast majority of his works are biographies and other forms of non-fiction, with a heavy emphasis on military history, particularly World War II.