Born in Hronov to a Jewish family, Hostovský studied at the gymnasium in Náchod in 1927, then took up philosophy in Prague.

After Paris was occupied in 1940, he fled to Portugal and then, in 1941, he travelled to the United States, where he worked in New York City at the consulate of Czechoslovakia's government-in-exile.

[1][2] After World War II, in 1946, he returned to Czechoslovakia and again worked at the Foreign Ministry, but in 1948, following the communist coup d'état, he began his second exile, first to Denmark, then to Norway and finally to the United States, where he worked as a Czech language teacher and later as a journalist and editor at Radio Free Europe.

Several of his novels, including The Midnight Patient and Three Nights, were translated in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Philip Hillyer Smith Jr., a scholar of linguistics and the Czech language.

His literary heroes fight (inner) evil, due to political situation are forced to leave their country and search for lost certainties and roots.