During World War II, he served as an artist and correspondent for YANK magazine, capturing and conveying wartime scenes from the front lines.

[1][5] A fellow officer, married to an American steel heiress, offered Sydney work as a secretary to his wife, and the Coggins family emigrated to Long Island, New York in 1923.

[1] While his father served with the Life Guards Regiment in France during World War I, Coggins and his mother lived with family in Folkestone, Kent.

After graduation from Roslyn in 1928 at age 17, he enrolled in the New York City Grand Central School of Art and studied under Edmund Greacen, George Pearse Ennis, and Wayman Adams.

This interest developed into a lifelong passion during his teens when he sailed small craft on Hempstead Harbor, near his new home on Long Island.

[15] During the early 1940s, Coggins obtained more work producing war pictures for other magazines, including a series of double-page spreads for the controversial newspaper PM,[16] and illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post.

[1] Because of the quality of his maritime illustrations, Coggins was invited by publisher Doubleday to provide artwork for a children's book about the U.S. Navy; the author being Fletcher Pratt, the well known military historian.

Coggins was invited to participate in Pratt's Naval Game, based on a wargame developed by Fred T. Jane involving dozens of tiny wooden ships, built on a scale of one inch to fifty feet.

[25] While in Britain, Coggins spent time on a Royal Navy convoy in the North Sea, witnessed the bombing of Saint-Lô,[1] and flew over Berlin in a Lancaster bomber.

In New York, as a result of his friendship with Fletcher Pratt, Coggins was introduced to the members of the Hydra Club, where he met Judith Merril and L. Ron Hubbard.

Coggins was also invited to join Pratt's Trap Door Spiders club, where he became closely associated with L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov.

The books were released amidst the great wave of interest in space travel sweeping the United States and the rest of the world in the 1950s,[1] and they were published in several countries and translated into other languages.

In this book Coggins acknowledges his father "whose twenty five years in the cavalry and lifetime interest in horses made his advice invaluable.

[35] In 1968, Coggins was invited to undertake part of a voyage on the NOAA vessel USC&GS Discoverer (OSS-02) from Barbados and commissioned to paint several images of the ship and crew.

[37] A retrospective exhibition and sale of artworks found in Coggins's home after his death was held at the Wyomissing Institute of the Arts in late 2006.

An annual "Jack Coggins Award" to be given to a deserving local artist was financed from part of the proceeds from the sale of these works.

[1][2] His original manuscripts and illustrations are part of The University of Southern Mississippi's Permanent Collection of outstanding authors and artists.

[11] In 2000, he was inducted to the International Association of Astronomical Artists Hall of Fame as a Living Legend and celebrated master of the genre of Space Art.