His name at birth was William Brown Sinclair, but he changed it, adopting his father's middle name as his first name.

Bower, a very prolific novelist, taught him to write "productively" and to employ a formula.

The same year, Sinclair married his first wife's cousin, Ruth Isabelle Miner.

Sinclair had disapproved of previous westerns he had read because he felt the action portrayed was far different that the lives cowboys actually led.

Later, before writing about the fishing industry, he worked as a commercial fisherman and then wrote Poor Man's Rock.