Stan McCown was born in Texas but as a member of a military family, lived all over the country and North Africa, which brought him a comfort zone with new places. After serving in the Air Force, including a stint on a missile crew in Okinawa, he ended up in Seattle, but has traveled widely since.

For Civil War writing, main influences are Shelby Foote and James McPherson. For fiction, initial influences were the likes of Fletcher Knebel, Philip Wylie, Orwell, Allistair MacLean, John Lecarré, and Graham Greene, Richard North Patterson, and the like.