He was born in Mount Abu, India, was educated in Plymouth, Devon, and worked as an insurance officer for ten years before studying for the stage and eventually becoming a writer.

In his spare time out of office hours he proceeded to create a stream of small works which he was able to sell.

In due course he left the insurance company to concentrate on his writing, while also working part-time as assistant editor for the weekly Black and White magazine.

She dedicated her 1932 novel Peril at End House to Phillpotts, and in her autobiography, she expressed gratitude for his early advice on fiction writing and quoted some of it.

In a 1976 interview for a book about her father, Adelaide described an incestuous "relationship" with him that she says lasted from the age of five or six until her early thirties, when he remarried.

He co-wrote several plays with his daughter Adelaide Phillpotts,[10] The Farmer's Wife and Yellow Sands (1926);[11] she later claimed their relationship was incestuous.

His Dartmoor cycle of 18 novels and two volumes of short stories still has many avid readers despite the fact that many titles are out of print.

The Human Boy[13] was a collection of schoolboy stories in the same genre as Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co., though different in mood and style.

Late in his long writing career he wrote a few books of interest to science fiction and fantasy readers, the most noteworthy being Saurus, which involves an alien reptilian observing human life.