The Harvard-educated Roger Hoar was the product of a New England family—the son of Sherman Hoar, grandson of former US Attorney General Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, great-grandson of Samuel Hoar, and great-great grandson of American founding father Roger Sherman, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Born in Waltham, Massachusetts, Roger Hoar received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1909 and his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1911. During World War I, he served in the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps. Hoar was a former Massachusetts assistant attorney general. He was a member of the Marquette University faculty in the graduate school of engineering. He also served as attorney of Bucyrus Erie Company of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Hoar served in the Massachusetts State Senate in 1911 and campaigned for women suffrage. Hoar was also an organizer and major force behind the enactment of the Employee Unemployment Benefits Act, served on the Commission to Compile Information & Data, 1917, taught mathematics and engineering, patented a system for aiming large guns by the stars, and authored landmark works on constitutional and patent law.

Under the pseudonym Ralph Milne Farley, Roger Hoar wrote a considerable amount of pulp-magazine science fiction during the period between the world wars, appearing in such publications as Argosy All-Story Weekly, Weird Tales, True Gang Life, and Amazing Stories, as well as occasional essays for The American Mercury, Scientific American, and science fiction fanzines. His works include The Radio Man and its numerous sequels, chiefly interplanetary and inner-world adventure yarns in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with whom he was friends; Hoar also wrote a number of archetypal time-travel-paradox tales, collected in book form as The Omnibus of Time, and “The House of Ecstasy,” told in the second-person and frequently reprinted since its initial appearance in Weird Tales (April 1938 issue). Upon relocating to the Midwest, where he worked as a corporate attorney for the firm of Bucyrus-Erie, Hoar joined the Milwaukee Fictioneers, whose members included Stanley G. Weinbaum, Robert Bloch, and Raymond A. Palmer. When Chicago-based Ziff-Davis Publishing Company bought the ailing Amazing Stories in 1938, Hoar was offered, but declined, the magazine’s editorship and recommended Palmer, who held the position through the 1940s.