Peter de Jonge was born in Stamford, Connecticut, and except for three years in Switzerland as a child, grew up there.
As a teenager, he was a highly ranked tennis player and competed in the National Juniors in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
His father, Alfred de Jonge, was born in Frankfurt, Germany, where he escaped the Holocaust in 1937, then returned eight years later with the U.S. Army to help defeat the German forces.
After graduating from Princeton University in 1977, de Jonge worked for weekly papers in Ridgefield, Wilton and Redding, Connecticut, and for the Associated Press in Newark and Albany.
When those pieces came to the attention of James Patterson, an executive at JWT who was just establishing himself as a best selling author, he hired de Jonge to be the first of his many co-authors on the golf novel Miracle on the 17th Green (1996).